Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property "originalCreateNotification" of undefined

[Rakesh Pai]

This is going to sound like the weirdest bug report.

Let me introduce myself first. I'm Rakesh Pai, developer at Errorception (http://errorception.com). We catch JS errors in people's websites by listening to window.onerror.

Across many of my users' websites, I've discovered that this error happens very frequently, and after trying to hunt it down, it looks like this extension might be culprit, though I can't be completely sure.

Here are some details about the error:

Message: Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property "originalCreateNotification" of undefined
Line number: 4 (Interestingly, it's always line 4, but this might be a coincidence)
File: Inline (I'm guessing this is because your page.js is somehow injected into, and runs within the context of, the page)
Some sample UserAgent strings:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_2) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.874.121 Safari/535.2
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/536.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/19.0.1077.3 Safari/536.4
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_3) AppleWebKit/535.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/17.0.963.56 Safari/535.11
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_3) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.142 Safari/535.19
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_2) AppleWebKit/535.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/16.0.912.77 Safari/535.7
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_1) AppleWebKit/536.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/19.0.1069.0 Safari/536.3
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.140 Safari/535.19
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0) AppleWebKit/535.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/16.0.912.77 Safari/535.7

From the data above, it appears that there are users on Windows and MacOSX that are installing your plugin, even though your plugin is only meant to work on Linux. This causes your plugin to break on such platforms, and throw errors. Such a breakage could potentially break websites itself if the script error causes on-page scripts to break in any way.

I have recorded over 700,000 instances of this error so far!

Anyway, I thought you might be interested in knowing about this, and you might be interested in fixing this even though you don't care to run on other platforms.

For now, I'm going to ignore all errors that have this error message in it across all my users. I'm not too comfortable with the idea, but I don't have any other solution at the moment. It would be ideal if you could try to fix this and roll out an update.

[Rakesh Pai (rakeshpai)]

Also, I'm not the first to notice this error: https://gist.github.com/1878283

[Ian Beveridge (ian-beveridge)]

It seems it's not just confined to one chrome extension. GrowlChrome has an identical bug:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/efihdfpglnibppjnmnpbmdglmlljgcbk

I wonder which extension was written first, since they seem to be by two different authors.