Google developers have said recently found a bug in Chromium, but they have decided not to fix it and just advise user to upgrade their Linux kernel past the 3.16 version.

Very few distributions actually ship with the latest Linux kernel and there are quite a few operating systems out there that are still supported and they are not using a version above the 3.16 branch. That is the reason why so many users have been confronted with the inability to install extensions into the browser. It might not seem like a big issue, but it underlines another problem.

The entire issue seems related to a new feature present in newer kernels called TSYNC. This is not present in older ones, more precisely anything below 3.16. Users with Chromium-based browsers would get an error when trying to install extensions and some of them went to Google for support, which turned out to be for nothing. The advice was to upgrade the kernel, which oftentimes is not a recommended procedure on most distros.

Google is not fixing it, it's the users' job

Bugs in userspace are usually fixed in the same ecosystem. That means that the kernel won't get updated if any problems with apps arise from their end. If the kernel breaks userspace, then it is the kernel developer's job to fix it, but this is not the case. It would have been Google's duty cu fix the issue.

"Ok, while it sounds like this is technically a regression, I'm going to mark this as Wontfix because there is a reasonable workaround of updating your kernel. If that causes great hardship for anyone and you want to do the work to figure out what's going on submit patches to fix it, I can provide pointers for where to start looking and code reviews for the patch," said one of the developers on the mailing list.

Basically, the advice was to upgrade the Linux kernel as a solution, which is not something you really want to do. If you're running Ubuntu, elementary OS, or something else, you might have a hard time installing a new kernel and you can break your system.

Fortunately, some of the major distros have already retrofitted the kernels so that they work with the latest Chromium, but not everyone will do it. This will become a non-issue in a year's time, or maybe Google developers will find another bug that can be fixed by upgrading the kernel once again.