I tried and could not reproduce a small test case - and the jsbin test case created for the Chromium error report could not reproduce the error in my version of Chrome (version 49.0.2623.110 m):
body { color: black; } div:before { content: attr( title ); font-weight: bold; } .text { overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap; } [title="Colour by explicit application"] .container .text { color: red; } [title="Colour by inheritance"] .container { color: red; }
<div title="Colour by explicit application"> <div class="container"> <p class="text"> One April day many years ago, at a time when I still wondered about the meaning of life, I went into a little cigar store on a back street to buy a cigar. I selected a dark and square El Zelo, put it in my cigar case, paid for it, and prepared to leave. But all of a sudden it occurred to me to show the young girl, who worked in the store and from whom I usually bought my cigars, a little sketch in India ink that I happened to have in my wallet. I had gotten it from a young artist and in my opinion it was very beautiful. "Look," I said and handed it to her. "What do you think of this?" </p> </div> </div> <div title="Colour by inheritance"> <div class="container"> <p class="text"> One April day many years ago, at a time when I still wondered about the meaning of life, I went into a little cigar store on a back street to buy a cigar. I selected a dark and square El Zelo, put it in my cigar case, paid for it, and prepared to leave. But all of a sudden it occurred to me to show the young girl, who worked in the store and from whom I usually bought my cigars, a little sketch in India ink that I happened to have in my wallet. I had gotten it from a young artist and in my opinion it was very beautiful. "Look," I said and handed it to her. "What do you think of this?" </p> </div> </div>
However, I myself encountered an error, and can still reproduce the error in the original case of the problem : I expect some complexity and / or changes for the DOM at runtime to be reproduced.
I was able to determine that in my code (and in the original case of the problem using the Chrome Dev tools) I can get around the error by ensuring that the color is inherited and not applied directly to the overflowing element itself. This could have been avoided procedurally by embedding the entire ellipsis overflow text in the packaging element and applying color instead.