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Comment by tedivm | Hacker News Reader

Was it actually a Chrome bug though? It only happened when the Grammerly desktop app was installed. My guess is grammerly is doing something sketchy.

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Maybe adding Grammarly created enough of a lag causing the GIF file to be shown?

That doesnt hold when you consider they opened the gif in the browser with and without grammarly and it only crashed with. So its not simply a bad gif and chrome.

Does Grammerly hook something in Chrome? If not, then it's still probably a Chrome bug, even if some second-order effect of Grammerly is necessary to trigger it.

It looks like the desktop Grammerly app hooks into all sorts of things, "An all-in-one writing assistant that works on your desktop and in your browser. Use it in apps, word processors, email clients, and more."

I'm thinking the same thing. It could be that Grammerly injects it's own loading spinner with the same filename into the HTML.

I wish they tried to simply rename the file instead of remove it.

The pr seems to suggest it's not the filename though given the new file was named the same and didn't crash.

I would guess grammarly is hooking chrome and potentially trying to read metadata about images, and the particular gif had metadata in a format they hadn't expected.

But only in Chrome. Not necessarily inconsistent with what you’re saying, just an interesting wrinkle.

While something like that is worth a shot, the PR they shared showed the file as being ‘assets/images/loader-spinner.gif’. If the file name was the cause that bug would be everywhere.

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