Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Resurrecting plugins after chrome crash

There is a odd possibility of losing installed plugins after file system crash. It happened to me today.

No plugins means popping up flash ads, no twitter client, no readability plugin, no fun.

The repair procedure is quite easy. There is a directory of so called Local Storage where chrome saves all site and plugin specific settings. At WindowsXP its in Documents and Settings/[username]/Local Settings/Application Data/Google/Chrome/User Data/Default/Local Storage. On other systems search for Local Storage folder or for chrome-extension_*.localstorage file.
Filenames begins with chrome-extension_ and after this prefix goes the string we are looking for. It's address of the plugin on Google Extension site. At the end of filename there is _0.localstorage suffix.

To access such install site we need to recreate url:
from chrome-extension_encaiiljifbdbjlphpgpiimidegddhic_0.localstorage
to something like this https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/encaiiljifbdbjlphpgpiimidegddhic

So the links for my favourite plugins RapidShare DownloadHelper, AdBlock+ Element Hiding Helper, Chromed Bird, FlashBlock and Readability Redux.