Good catch Toote, it went away when I manually removed the Signal extension it all works a lot better (just mv-ed out of ~/.config/chromium/Default/Extensions). If you use it, does it help for you as well? Should extensions be able to crash the browser? (Not sure if they can include native code.)
Cheers, -- Tollef Fog Heen UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are