Google admits Chrome bug is crashing Apple's MacBook Airs

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Over the past few days, Apple’s Discussion forums have had several users posting that their brand new MacBook Airs have been receiving the dreaded Kernel Panic errors since they had installed the newest version of the Google Chrome web browser on to the system.

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Early Friday, Google.com has issued an official statement on the matter and has said the following:

“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.”

More on this as it develops.

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Dan Uff

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