When I switched my desktop environment from KDE to UWSM Hyprland, Chromium started to behave abnormally. It opened normal, but I didn’t load any page, the UI was not frozen. But pages stuck loading for ever (even when no Internet connection, so the pages saying that there isn’t Internet also were not showing, it just was loading). Except for the system pages (like the ones for flags and configuration), those were loading instantly.
Other of the symptoms was that Chromium wasn’t detecting that was already the default browser (so the prompt for setting it as the default was appearing). Shortcuts like <Ctrl+Shift+T> were opening new windows instead of new tabs. Also the UI was being draw with another fonts.
For some reason if I set the environment variable KDE_FULL_SESSION to true (on Hyprland), all this problems were fixed.
After a long debugging session (like two days), I found that Chromium is waiting for the secret storage to load (and on Hyprland my secret storage wasn’t showing a prompt to unlock it). When I set it to KDE, Chromium used KDE specific methods to load it, so it was able to bypass the prompt and load normally.
At the end of the day, if you are switching desktop environments, the solution is to pass the flag: --password-store=<your-impl> to Chromium, so it loads it consistently. The value --password-store=basic uses plain text encryption, but gets rid of all problems.
Other of the symptoms of this, is that whenever that Chromium loaded normally, it will clean half of my cookies (so signing me out of most of my accounts) every time that you started it on a different DE.