Vimium? More like need-to-refresh-the-page-for-it-to-work-ium

July 7, 2023 9:19 AM

On both my work and home computers, Vimium for Chrome sometimes only shows the letters after a refresh of the page. Half the time it works fine, half the time I need to refresh. Any way to fix, or an alternative extension?

It seems to be related to a new Chrome update, because it happened first on my home computer, which gets updates to Chrome sooner. It isn't just a problem in Chrome tabs I haven't used in a while, it is often the same tab - it works without refresh for one page, then on the next page I go to it doesn't, then it does, etc. all in the same tab.

posted by catquas to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Best answer: Are you experiencing the collecting hints … issue?
posted by zamboni at 9:23 AM on July 7, 2023

Response by poster: Yes, but that issues doesn't seem to mention anything about refreshing fixing the problem. For me refreshing the page fixes it every time
posted by catquas at 9:33 AM on July 7, 2023

Best answer: That's the intermittingly part. See this much older issue - it's been happening for a while, and seems to be getting worse due to recent-ish versions of Chrome enabling bfcache. If I understand the issue correctly, it happens when the extension gets hung up on trying to index the links in a subsection of the page, which may or may not be accessible via bfcache. You can either jump to the vimium-c fork, which allegedly properly handles freeze/resume events and does not have the issue, or wait for mainline vimium to fix the problem.
posted by zamboni at 10:05 AM on July 7, 2023 [1 favorite]