Google Chrome is a popular web browser and one of the most popular browsers on the market. It’s also one of the most vulnerable browsers to crashes, as it relies on a lot of data that can be lost if your computer crashes. If you’re a Google Chrome user, it’s important to take some steps to help protect your profile from being lost in a crash. Here are some tips:

  1. Keep your computer up and running as usual. If you have any other activities that require your computer to be active, keep those activities going as well. This will help prevent your computer from crashing and losing all of your data.
  2. Back up all of your important files and folders before you start using Google Chrome. This will help you if something goes wrong and you lose all of your data in a crash.
  3. Use an antivirus program to protect yourself from any potential infections that may occur during a crash. This will help keep your data safe and sound while you’re using Google Chrome.

Note: of course, this technique won’t work for every scenario, but we’ve had to do this a few times this week and figured we’d share.

Recently, we’ve been having problems with the dev channel of Google Chrome locking up, especially when viewing PDFs with the built-in PDF viewer. When this happens and we force quit Chrome, we get two error messages when we start it up again, noting that “Your profile could not be opened correctly.”

Fortunately, the thing that we care about most – the tabs we had open before Chrome crashed – are still there. Our search engine shortcuts and web history, however, are not. How do we get rid of these error messages and recover our search engines and history?

Well, we’re not quite sure how to recover the search engines and history, but we can get rid of the error messages and return your profile to a stable state. You’ll have to remap the search engine shortcuts and rebuild your web history, but at least you get to keep all of your other settings, and most importantly, your open tabs!

Recover Your Profile

Open a terminal window (Applications > Accessories > Terminal or Ctrl+Alt+T in Ubuntu). Enter the following commands.

Note: As mentioned above, doing these commands will wipe out your search engines and web history. They were kind of gone to begin with anyway.

The next time you load up Google Chrome, you’ll find that those error messages are gone, and you can now remap your search engine shortcuts and build up your web history.

Disable the Built-in PDF Viewer

If it’s the built-in PDF viewer that’s causing the crashes, you can disable it through Chrome’s plug-in settings page.

Open up Chrome and enter

into the address bar.

Find the Chrome PDF Viewer entry and click the Disable link.

From now on, PDFs you click on will be handled as usual, instead of with the built-in PDF viewer. No need to restart Chrome, and hopefully, less crashes in the future!