I started to notice this bug when I was playing with my new tool in my tools playground, the HTML Tags Counter. I loaded my site zenverse.net and viewed the HTML source using Google Chrome. Then, I copied and pasted the codes to run an analysis using my own tool. I was “amazed” by the result, I get different errors (different unclosed/unopened tags) almost everytime I reloaded the “view source” page. Next, of course I tried running same analysis using my site’s HTML source code gotten from Firefox. For 5 times, they are all perfect with no error. So, I confirmed that the problem is from Google Chrome.

The Random Missing Characters – My Case

It seems that everytime you view source of any pages. Google Chrome would miss out some characters, mostly one of these: < or >

In my case, two examples were shown below:

Notice the <a> tag after <p>

a class="addthis_button" href="http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&pub=zenverse">
 

Notice the last </li> tag

December 2009 (6)
 
November 2009 (10)/li> 

Reproducing the error

Using Google Chrome, you can try to load any validated site’s source code, preferably websites with long source codes. You can try it with our site. Next, go to the W3C Validator and paste them into the textarea and validate. You might notice some error.

Do the same thing again using Firefox.

What is wrong with Google Chrome recently? Last week we just discovered a bug that causes the browser to load very slowly or not to load at all, and now we discovered another new bug here.