Chrome to show error codes, similar to Windows BSOD screens
Google Chrome will get support for error codes, similar to the ones seen on Windows blue screen of death (BSOD) crash pages.
The idea is to provide Chrome users with a code they can search online and find debugging help for various types of crashes.
Work on this new feature started in November last year, and the error codes are already under testing in current Chrome Canary (v81) releases.
The error codes will appear on the so-called "sad tab" page, also known as the "Aw, Snap!" page, which Chrome displays when a tab crashes.
There are currently 137 error codes configured in Chrome, according to the Chromium project source code. All the error codes are listed here, and they deal with a wide range of error types, ranging from tabs lacking access to proper hardware resources to issues with Chrome's security sandbox and problems caused by the underlying operating system.
If you want to test and see how these error codes look, users can open Chrome Canary and navigate to chrome://crash or chrome://kill to trigger a on-demand tab crash.
The feature is currently under testing, and while it's being tested in Chrome v81, it's not yet set in stone that the feature will ship with Chrome 81. However, the error codes appear to be a permanent mainstay in future Chrome releases.
Furthermore, since the feature was proposed by Eric Lawrence, a software engineer working on Microsoft's new Chromium-based Edge browser, you can also expect it to roll out in the other Chromium-based browsers as well, including the likes of Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi.