[aaaronic]

This is _so_ familiar!

I have seen accessibility tools in Chrome lead to this kind of issue in the past with a dropdown menu -- to the point where it could be replicated with a miniscule amount of HTML. The particular bug I hit 2 years ago was in Chromium-Edge, but the symptoms and cause were very similar.

Grammarly almost certainly leans on some of the accessibility tools in Chrome. These tools are somewhat different in the various Chromium flavors (Edge, Brave, Chrome, etc.).

[nonethewiser]

So the theory would be that grammarly desktop sees the gif (what? How?) and calls some browser accessibility function on it (or?) which chrome cant handle and it crashes?

[aaaronic]

With the bug I saw years ago, just having certain accessibility features of the browser enabled _at all_ caused the bug (we were able to temporarily mitigate by disabling some obscure Edge accessibility feature via a launch parameter). So, my theory here is Grammarly is just enabling an optional accessibility feature in Chrome that has this bug when trying to "read" the gif.

[saagarjha]

Perhaps it has an extension that it installs that does this?

[codethief]

They did try disabling browser extensions, according to the blog post.