Debugging (the annoying web kind)

This isn't even proper debugging - but still, I labored through it for an hour now, so I guess it's worth a post.


At some point yesterday, some javascript controls (across all websites) seemed to stop working. I'm not very strong in web development, but I believe those were all ajax controls (specifically, facebook's ticker and chat stopped responding to clicks in them). 


I started with the usual voodoo debug - close and open chrome, disable and enable javascrip, reboot the computer (which always seems to have a positive effect), and neither worked. I tried upgrading chrome - same thing. IE (gasp) worked fine, so I kept on working. I figured it must be something in my local chrome configuration.


Copying it to a backup and starting over made it work - progress! Once I copied everything I thought I might need, the problem returned. So I've isolated the problem pretty well, but still don't know what caused it. The next step was clean the user data again, and this time copy over the bare minimum - cookies, settings, saved passwords, bookmarks, history, etc. That worked again.


Happy with that, I set to installing my extensions with the new profile. I went through the basic ones - AdBlock, Gmail mail checker, IE tab, translate, FireBug, etc. One of the last extensions I installed was FastestChrome - a pretty neat extension, with all sorts of features to help you browse faster - highlight text and search it in Google or Wikipedia automatically, pre-load additional result pages (when searching, or browsing a messageboard, for example), etc. After installed and enabling it, I found that the problem returned. As you're probably guessing, it seems to be FastestChrome's fault. I have no idea what triggered it - it worked fine for months - but disabling it seems to do the trick.


Why am I writing this? No idea. But it wasted an hour of my life now, so maybe it will spare you from the same. If you read this, and have any idea what might have triggered it, I'd be happy to know - even though I have nothing to do with the development of FastestChrome, and have no current intentions of debugging it further.


-Guy