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Google Chrome Causing Freezing and Crashing on New Mac Notebooks

Thursday June 28, 2012 9:25 pm PDT by Eric Slivka

Over the past several days, Gizmodo has been highlighting freezing and crashing issues on several of its staff's new MacBook Air models, linking the problems to Google Chrome. Switching to Apple's Safari browser eliminated all of the issues, and thus the site recommended that owners of the new machines avoid Chrome for the time being.

Google has now issued a statement to Gizmodo acknowledging that Chrome is the culprit and discussing the steps it is taking to address the issue. While Google has disabled some of Chrome's GPU acceleration on an emergency basis as it seeks to deploy a permanent solution, the company has also filed a bug report with Apple as such issues should not be able to cause an entire system to freeze or crash.

"We have identified a leak of graphics resources in the Chrome browser related to the drawing of plugins on Mac OS X. Work is proceeding to find and fix the root cause of the leak.

The resource leak is causing a kernel panic on Mac hardware containing the Intel HD 4000 graphics chip (e.g. the new Macbook Airs). Radar bug number 11762608 has been filed with Apple regarding the kernel panics, since it should not be possible for an application to trigger such behavior.

While the root cause of the leak is being fixed, we are temporarily disabling some of Chrome's GPU acceleration features on the affected hardware via an auto-updated release that went out this afternoon (Thursday June 28). We anticipate further fixes in the coming days which will re-enable many or all of these features on this hardware."

With the issue affecting all systems using Intel HD 4000 graphics, all of Apple's notebook models released earlier this month are susceptible and owners of the new MacBook Pro models are indeed also reporting the issue.

First launched in September 2008, Chrome has steadily gained in overall popularity among desktop Internet browsers and is currently running neck-and-neck with Firefox for the second position behind Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Related roundup: MacBook Air

Top Rated Comments

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digitalhen

24 months ago

...the company has also filed a bug report with Apple as such issues should not be able to cause an entire system to freeze or crash.

This really is the key part of the article. There's no way that this should be happening in the first place.

Rating: 65 Positives

AustinIllini

24 months ago

Listen Apple, you gotta make it available to set chrome as a default browser in ios because I ain't comin' back to safari what so ever.

What does this comment have to do with mac notebooks?

Rating: 32 Positives

tech4all

24 months ago

am i the only one who uses chrome?

Nope Chrome user here. Far better than Safari and Firefox. Never crashes or freezes on me. Go figure :rolleyes:

lol at Google-haters on here. I think sometimes Apple fanboys hate Google more than M$.

Rating: 26 Positives

Big-TDI-Guy

24 months ago

All your kernel are belong to Google!

Rating: 26 Positives

ghsNick

24 months ago

Google Chrome sucks...still waiting on gestures to be updated since Lion came out. Would be a great browser if I could take advantage of hand gestures while I'm using it.

I'll stick to Safari until it's updates (if that ever happens) :rolleyes:

Rating: 23 Positives

wizard

24 months ago

am i the only one who uses chrome?

It is Safari all the way for me.

Rating: 22 Positives

slffl

24 months ago

I can't stand Chrome! I've been using it on my work PC for a while now, and it's ALWAYS locking up and crashing, and most of the time it's while browsing Google! Especially their RSS reader. It's horrible and I'm amazed so many people think it's so great.

Rating: 22 Positives

wordoflife

24 months ago

Firefox represent!

I really liked Firefox up until version 3.

Rating: 21 Positives

Jayse

24 months ago

Firefox represent!

Rating: 20 Positives

ScottishDuck

24 months ago

So when Chrome freezes and crashes Macs, Google blames it on Apple.
Seriously?
Just wow.

I switched from IE6-7-8 to Chrome to Firefox to IE9 to Safari. I like Safari the best, Firefox second, IE9 third and Chrome last. The way it renders things and the UI for some reason doesn't sit well with me... :/

Because an operating system shouldn't be allowed to crash simply from running a browser. It's bad security if anything. Duh.

Rating: 19 Positives

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