Error codes are coming to Chrome to help get to the bottom of Aw, Snap! messages

When Chrome crashes, a message reading Aw, Snap! appears -- and it's not particularly helpful. Mindful of this, Google is going to introduce error codes to the browser to help users determine what has gone wrong.

The idea is similar to the blue screen of death (BSoD) that will be familiar to many Windows users. It's currently being tested in the Canary build of Chrome 81, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the error codes will appear in the final build of this version number.

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Google has been working on the error codes for at least a couple of months now, and if you have Chrome Canary installed you can test out what they will look like. Just navigate to chrome://crash or chrome://kill, and Chrome will force a tab crash for you.

As noted by ZDNet, it's not just the main Chrome browser that is going to gain error codes, but also other Chromium-based browsers. This means that Brave, Opera and the Chromium version of Microsoft Edge will also benefit from the feature.

You can view a list of the 137 error codes that have been drawn up so far here.

Image credit: Ilya Sergeevych / Shutterstock