I want to report that I tracked a very strange crashing behavior down to the Norton Safe Web extension.
After everything was running fine for 10 to 15 minutes, it began yesterday (Feb, 22, 2026) with dying tabs. There were no hints in the chrome task manager, nothing in chrome://crashes , nothing in chrome://conflicts.
But it turned out that at the same time, extensions were crashing as well. And even sites like “chrome://extensions/”.
Tabs that had already been loaded before the that specific point in time of crashing things kept working, but every new loaded tab or woken up tab crashed.
This also kept occurring after chrome restarts, but always about those 10 to 15 minutes delayed.
I then asked Gemini and we tracked it down to the Norton Safe Web addon, always working within those 10-15 minute windows. After the deactivation of this addon (not any other one), everything worked fine again (even after the waiting time). There were also no hints in ANY Norton log.
I don’t know what specifically Norton did to cause this but I want to let you know that in my case this kind of behavior (crashes while nothing is reported or logged anywhere) was caused by the Norton Safe Web addon .
I also reported that to google (support .google .com/chrome/thread/411783983) and they suggested to inform you as well.
Yes, current version: Version 145.0.7632.110 (64-Bit)
It began yesterday, not Feb 10, 2026.
Maybe some updated resources Norton Safe Web uses?
I had tested it with only few tabs as well, same result.
Those are the only other plugins that had been active in parallel to the Norton plugins.
However, deactivating and reactivating those one by one did not change anything.
Weirdly, another one wrote of similar problems, but seemingly unrelated to the plugin. But the coincidence of appearance time is stunning.
Also using default settings.
I now activated the Norton extensions again (this time also Antitrack) and am now waiting for crashes.
Yes I run chrome sync. But as Gemini had pointed that out as a possible issue, I had deactivated it for the diagnose, so no synching loop of destruction.
