Google admits Chrome is crashing Macbook air

Google has admitted that a bug in its Chrome browser on the the Mac OS X is causing the Macbook Air to crash.

In a statement on the subject to Gizmodo Google said,

“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.”

A kernel panic is an action taken by an operating system upon detecting an internal fatal error from which it cannot safely recover. In Windows Operating Systems its known as the “Blue screen of death”. ( Read more on what a kernel panic is)