Trying to comment on a particular question on the full site crashes Android Chrome

Question

I wanted to add a comment to this History SE question.

When I hit "add a comment", Chrome crashes. You hit "add a comment " below the question, the comment edit box appears for a split second, but the browser immediately terminates.

Bizarrely, it's only this question. Trying to add comments to other History questions don't cause a crash, nor do attempts to add comments on other sites. Also, I can add a comment to the answer posted for the question!

It looks like there are some old questions about comments crashing Chrome, but this is the latest version of Chrome from the Google Play Store on Android, using the "full site" view (with responsiveness both enabled and disabled). This does not happen in (the deprecated) mobile view.

Update: This action does not crash Firefox.

Update: Chrome just crashed trying to edit this SFF question.

Answer 1

The crash info showed the exception class was a java.lang.NullPointerException. There was also a stack trace, 10 levels of android.view.view.populatevirtualstructure (sorry, wrong capitalization), and under that, something about ProvideAutofillStructure.

So, I set the device's Autofill service to "None" and then force stopped Chrome, and the issue went away. I changed the Autofill service back to the same app it had been before. The problem did not initially return, but eventually came back. Clearing the Autofill service again stopped the crashes again.

I was able to generate a bug report and locate one of the stack traces in the log dump:

09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime: FATAL EXCEPTION: main
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime: Process: com.android.chrome, PID: 11908
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime: java.lang.NullPointerException: Attempt to invoke virtual method 'long android.view.accessibility.AccessibilityNodeInfo.getSourceNodeId()' on a null object reference
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at android.view.View.populateVirtualStructure(View.java:10590)
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at android.view.View.populateVirtualStructure(View.java:10671)
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at android.view.View.populateVirtualStructure(View.java:10671)
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at android.view.View.populateVirtualStructure(View.java:10671)
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at android.view.View.populateVirtualStructure(View.java:10671)
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at android.view.View.populateVirtualStructure(View.java:10671)
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at android.view.View.populateVirtualStructure(View.java:10671)
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at android.view.View.populateVirtualStructure(View.java:10671)
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at android.view.View.onProvideVirtualStructureCompat(View.java:9710)
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at android.view.View.onProvideAutofillVirtualStructure(View.java:9781)
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at android.view.View.dispatchProvideStructure(View.java:10733)
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at android.view.View.dispatchProvideAutofillStructure(View.java:10725)
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at android.view.ViewGroup.dispatchProvideAutofillStructure(ViewGroup.java:4456)
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at android.view.ViewGroup.dispatchProvideAutofillStructure(ViewGroup.java:4476)
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at android.view.ViewGroup.dispatchProvideAutofillStructure(ViewGroup.java:4476)
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at android.view.ViewGroup.dispatchProvideAutofillStructure(ViewGroup.java:4476)
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at android.view.ViewGroup.dispatchProvideAutofillStructure(ViewGroup.java:4476)
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at android.view.ViewGroup.dispatchProvideAutofillStructure(ViewGroup.java:4476)
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at android.view.ViewGroup.dispatchProvideAutofillStructure(ViewGroup.java:4476)
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at android.view.ViewGroup.dispatchProvideAutofillStructure(ViewGroup.java:4476)
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at android.app.assist.AssistStructure$WindowNode.<init>(AssistStructure.java:598)
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at android.app.assist.AssistStructure.<init>(AssistStructure.java:2505)
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at android.app.ActivityThread.handleRequestAssistContextExtras(ActivityThread.java:4114)
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at android.app.ActivityThread$H.handleMessage(ActivityThread.java:2272)
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:106)
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:246)
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:8595)
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Native Method)
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at com.android.internal.os.RuntimeInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(RuntimeInit.java:602)
09-04 11:57:07.628 10259 11908 11908 E AndroidRuntime:  at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:1130)

Thanks to @SonicTheAnonymousHedgehog for pointing me to the crash info.

Update: I switched to a different autofill service and Chrome still crashed.