After reports surfaced of its
Chrome browser causing crashes
on some of Apple's new MacBook systems, Google has publicly
acknowledged the issue, claiming a workaround is immediately available
and a true fix is in the works.
Owners of Apple's new
MacBook Air
had been experiencing persistent kernel panics on their systems, which
after investigation was found to be rooted around actions like closing
tabs and otherwise managing windows in Google's Chrome Web browser.
Unfortunately, being kernel panics, the crashes did not just close the
browser, but caused the entire system to require rebooting.
In a statement to Gizmodo,
Google recognizes the problem that MacBook Air users are having, but
also suggests that while Chrome is causing the crashes, the problem also
lies with how some of Apple's drivers are built.
"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."
If you are experiencing crashes when using Chrome on your Mac with
Intel HD 4000 graphics, then you can install the latest development or
Canary releases (available here),
which have had workarounds implemented and should not crash the system.
Alternatively you can use another Web browser or wait for the official
Chrome release to be updated.
While this problem is rooted in Chrome, it ultimately is an issue
with Apple's drivers that allows for the kernel panic to be triggered,
so hopefully Apple will issue a software update in the near future that
closes this hole.
by
Topher Kessler