Chrome will start showing error codes to help with debugging

In an effort to help users debug their systems, Google Chrome will soon get support for error codes that resemble those seen during a Windows blue screen of death (BSOD) crash page.

By providing Chrome users with these codes, Google will make it easier for them to search online to find help for a variety of different types of crashes. Previously users were left in the dark as to why their browser or a particular tab had crashed, making it difficult to troubleshoot the problem.

The search giant began working on this new feature in November of last year but error codes are currently under testing in the latest version (v81) of Chrome Canary.

The error codes themselves will appear on the “Aw, Snap!” page which Chrome shows when a tab crashes and most Chrome users are likely familiar with this page.

Error codes

According to the Chromium project source code, 137 error codes are currently configured in Chrome. A full list of all error codes can be found here and the codes cover a wide variety of error types.

Chrome Canary users can take a look at how these error codes look by navigating to chrome://crash or chrome://kill to trigger a manual tab crash.

The new feature is currently being tested in Chrome 81 though it may not ship with the final release of the software. Thankfully though, the error codes do appear to a permanent fixture in future Chrome releases.

Error codes could also be making their way to other Chromium-based browsers such as Brave, Opera and Vivaldi since the feature was proposed by Eric Lawrence who is a software engineer working on Microsoft’s new Chromium-based Edge browser.