New MacBook Air Crashing? Blame Google Chrome, Probably

Gizmodo ^ | 6/27/2012 | Molly Oswacks

[aft_lizard]

Earlier, we posted about our new MacBook Airs, which, still in only their first days of use, have been freezing and crashing like crazy. This generated some great discussion threads, from both readers and writers alike.

Apparently, we're not the only ones with this MacBook bug!

[TheStickman]

Zero issues with Chrome on my 2011 11” MBA. Memory leak in Safari sucks still. Chrome works fine.

[TheBattman]

You prefer Chrome? Have you figured out how to completely stop Google from harvesting 100% of your browsing, posting, and other online activities while running Chrome?

As far as Firefox VS. IE - you actually prefer IE over FireFox? Why? (seriously)

[TheBattman]

The same could be said of Toyota inadvertent accelerations. "

The ones caused by the carpet mats? or the ones brought on by drivers accidentally pressing the gas instead of the brake?

[norwaypinesavage]

"The ones caused by the carpet mats? or the ones brought on by drivers accidentally pressing the gas instead of the brake?"

No, the ones caused by the growth of "tin whiskers" in the TPS, as discovered by NASA: http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4234309/Toyota-accelerations-revisited-hanging-by-a--tin--whisker

[aft_lizard]

Love it or hate it but IE simply works. No it’s not as fast as the other browsers but it doesn’t crash, if it does it immediately reloads the page. People need to get past IE6-7, the worst browsers in History for security, since IE8 MS has done a great job of making it more secure and stable. Also MS has a 64 bit native browser, which is good because it can access more memory without it bogging down. Otherwise I use Chrome because its faster. I don’t care if they track my usage really, not like I am going to illegal sites or anything. Plus you can always go incognito if you are so worried.

To me FF has gone from good, but flawed, to just terrible. It doesnt render sites correctly, I have to use script stoppers because it will stop in it’s tracks, Adobe simply crashes alot in it..etc..It was good as an alternative when it came out, but its quickly turning into a has been.

[antiRepublicrat]

Also MS has a 64 bit native browser, which is good because it can access more memory without it bogging down

In all my years of browsing, even with multiple tabs open, I have never had a browser's process come close to the 32-bit application limit of 2 GB. Of all the things that can benefit from a 64-bit address space, browsers aren't one of them.

[cynwoody]

The recent upgrade to Adobe Flash has been doing a hit job on FireFox. It causes videos (youtube, etc.) to attempt to load, but fail.

I find that viewing videos in HTML5 works better. For Youtube, you opt-in to the HTML5 Trial, and most, if not all, of your Youtube videos will then be served in HTML5.

[cynwoody]

Don’t hold the operating system responsible when a third-party application fails.

But do hold the operating system responsible when an application manages to crash it. That's not supposed to be possible.

According to the article, the following statement appears on the Chrome Release Blog (emphasis added):

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.

[aft_lizard]

I disagree. Although you might have excess memory available the amount accessed is still limited by the scheduler. In the case of FF, even though I may have 8 gb’s of system memory, a memory leak hitting 1gb+ was still more than enough to bog the browser itself down.

[antiRepublicrat]

In the case of FF, even though I may have 8 gb’s of system memory, a memory leak hitting 1gb+ was still more than enough to bog the browser itself down.

You're screwed no matter what with a memory leak. With a 64 bit OS that leaves enough addressable physical memory for all other processes, you won't get a memory advantage for an app moving to 64-bit unless it actually uses more than 2 GB. You can get other advantages (double the registers for x64, etc), but more addressable memory isn't one of them.