Chrome Tab Breaks with RESULT_CODE_KILLED_BAD_MESSAGE when service worker tries to cache requests which contain headers with utf-8 characters

Question

I stumbled upon this issue during development and it took me quite some hours to figure out. It seems that if you have a service worker and your service worker tries to cache a request which contains a header with the ü character in Chrome browser tab will break entirely with RESULT_CODE_KILLED_BAD_MESSAGE leaving you without any reasonable error message for it. Or at least pointing you in the right direction for finding the fix.

I tested the same thing in Safari / Firefox and it seems this browsers ignore this character and are not affected by the issue. While adding the character ü in a header is forbidden by the spec as explained here I would expect Chrome to give a better error and not just die.

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 07 '22 at 09:44

The obvious fix is to encode with base 64 your headers to ensure there are not no weird characters which are not allowed. The fix can be found also on this post but the connection is hard to make while googling for results.

btoa(myStringWithNotAllowedCharacters)

Chrome Tab Breaks with RESULT_CODE_KILLED_BAD_MESSAGE when service worker tries to cache requests which contain headers with utf-8 characters

1 Answers1