One of the weirdest Chrome bugs to be unearthed for a while, in which a 13-character string of text would crash the browser on a Mac, has been fixed.
While the number of users who were likely to be affected by the strange bug is small, being limited to Mac users with the Assyrian language installed in OS X and loading up a web page containing the row of characters, it had the potential to cause widespread annoyance.
Had it not been so obscure, that is.
Mac users without the Assyrian language pack installed were not affected by the issues. Instead, when loading a page with the crash-causing characters embedded, they were treated to a row of blank rectangles rather than their browser tab crashing instantly.
The developer who discovered the issue underlined its potential to do harm when reporting it to Google, writing at the time:
“You could imagine someone spamming this message in Hangouts/Gmail and just straight-up force crashing all Mac Chrome browsers. Someone could post this on Facebook, and force-crash all Mac Chrome browsers that saw it.”
And Relax: Bug Fixed
The good news is that Google say the bug has been fixed and pushed out to the stable builds of Chrome for Mac (presumably beta and dev versions were either unaffected or also patched).
To check you’re up to date head to Chrome > Settings > About Chrome and look for a version number matching 41.0.2272.104 (or later).
- Source: Venture Beat (via Cult of Mac)