Bad News: Google Chrome Crashes Completely. Separate Processes?
by
on September 03, 2008,
So I’ve been playing with Google Chrome for a while now and I have to admit it: it took only these few hours to crash it. Yes, completely crash, not disabling one tab with some process to be blamed for it. Unfortunately I have not captured the screen since I switched back from English to Russian-language version of the browser to see how good the translation is (far from perfect as usually, actually) and I did not think the notification that Chrome crashed in Russian would help anybody here. But I have found a screenshot of what you are supposed to see if you manage to repeat my success:
So basically what I’ve done was opening 15 or so tabs in the browser to write my review today (and believe me, 15 is far less that what I usually have open in Firefox). Then I switched to other tasks that included reading a great number of tabs I already had open in Firefox so I did not think it was worth reopening the tabs in Chrome so I simply went back to Firefox (especially since I know I am not migrating any time soon - or at least until my crucial plug-ins are supported).
A few hours later I went back to Chrome and performed a few tasks in the browser - just out of curiosity to see how it performs after some time of running in the background. And I was disappointed to notice that it worked much slower than when I initially tested it. So I’m afraid that those same people praising Chrome for how fast it is will start complaining soon as it seems to consume much more memory with time - and that’s bad news since it’s one of the major complaints of Firefox users as well.
But I kept Google Chrome running anyway and continued with some other tasks. A couple of hours later I returned to see if anything changed. I did some reading on Google Reader and performed a couple of searches (on Google as well). But then all of a sudden (pretty unexpectedly as I did not notice any substantial speed decrease) Chrome crashed completely. Yes, completely - it did not allow me to use all my tabs but the one responsible for the problem as promised. It simply crashed, period.
I was embarrassed about it because I am naturally much more willing to say good things about applications and software I test than criticize them so I decided to do a quick search in Google Blog Search - this one returned a few posts with very similar examples described - but they were not numerous and some seemed to be intentional. I also tried a search on Twitter and it returned quite a number of results with some users mentioning how they managed to crash Chrome browsing Gmail or Google Maps - something unexpected to me:
So I may be embarrassed by the whole crash thing I caused without even trying but it is heartwarming to know that at least I am not alone. In anticipation of the comments that it’s a beta and I should keep that in mind before complaining, I would like to point out that I am not even complaining here - simply stating the fact for the record. After all, it is not difficult for me to open the browser again with all my previous tabs easily accessible.
But there is one thing about it that worries me quite a lot and that is the independent processes for all the tabs. This sounds like too much of an incentive to download Chrome and start using it - thus the heavy disappointment that it failed to work as promised. I am sure that the team behind the browser is clever and experienced enough to fix such problems in the next release(s), especially if more users opt in to sending Google crash reports (I will be sure to do it myself now at least). But the fact remains: we do seem to have immoderate expectations when it comes to anything launched by Google - thus many users will keep forgetting it’s a beta and is not supposed to be stable yet and will complain anyway. And when it comes to the most appealing functionality, it must be even worse.
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Another Croatian
John Jones
Svetlana Gladkova
Opensource 
Michael Fidler 
A) Whoa, indeed.
B) It’s far from version 3.0. If you want to compare it to Firefox you should actually be comparing it to Firebird. And that comparison is a complete Goog win.
C) The processes are actually there to place a bit of responsibility on the user. I’m not excusing a complete browser crash but I’m suggesting that those separate processes are there for you - the user - to, ultimately, keep it from crashing. Just like good OS management, the user needs to keep an eye on things or they can inevitably fail.
D) Did you notice any attempt for it to report the crash back to Google? Any outgoing logs or anything? Definitely interested in the response to this question.
I can’t get it to display any Web sites, except Google Search.
Typically what happens is that the Web site is displayed for a second or two, and then the frowny-face folder appears.
This happens with common Web sites, like CNN, Engaget, GMail, and Google Docs.
I tried to repeat what you has done, which was to open 15-20 taps in Chrome and open 15 tabs in Firefox as well, and I was indeed able to get it to crash. Here is the thing you fail to mention though. It was a ‘lack of ram’ crash, which would have happened to any program I had running, and did indeed happen to Firefox at the same time. With 35 tabs opened between Firefox and Chrome I was sucking up almost 2 gigs of memory, 950mb from Firefox, about 540 from the OS, etc. and the rest from Chrome. I am not defending Chrome here, just stating that unless you are running a 64bit OS with 4 gigs of ram there is a good chance you would have crashed any browser.
I too accidentally crashed it in less then 20 minutes of use by going to a photos thumbnail page and opening about 10 large, full-size photos in tabs then saving the photo in each tab to my disk and then closing the tabs. Going to another thumbnail page, repeat 4 or 5 times.
After saving about 40 photos (and only having 3 tabs open) or so it crashed on me. It gave me the message saying it crashed, did I want to restart? I said yes. Went to the page again. It crashed again, this time with a Blue Screen of Death STOP error and crashed my entire OS. To put this in perspective, I’ve probably seen about 3 BSOD in the past 8 years since using Windows 2000 and later operating systems. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a BSOD on my current computer and operating system.
I can do the same procedure on Firefox and it does slow and and I get a program crash after hours and hours and hours. Chrome is beta software, so I’m not too upset, but it does make it clear to me that it does not have the same stability or maturity that Firefox does right now. To be expected at this stage, but still true, despite the assertions of people like EntrepreNerd.
It also seemed to be churning my disk, even after closing all my tabs but one and reopening new things in other tabs. I suspect memory issues as EntrepreNerd says, but not “You’re a stupid user and it’s your fault cause you opened too many tabs” like he asserts. More like issues with memory leaks or memory not being reclaimed once it’s not longer used.
I’m sure they’ll correct these things at some point, but this isn’t a “user error,” but a software problem. And even if it was a user problem, shouldn’t well designed software fail gracefully (say by preventing you from opening so many tabs that it crashes) rather than catastrophically?
Anyway, it looks like it might be good sometime, but let’s not play blame-the-user games because someone is a Google fanboy.
@trench: Actually the only thing I compared Chrome with Firefox about is that they both seem to start slowing down after a while. It’s not to compare them in performance as this is obviously a beta version for Chrome, it is nothing but an example here.
As for a user’s responsibility to keep an eye on separate processes to disable them once they start to misbehave, it may be a valid suggestion but unfortunately not really appropriate for a regular internet user. And I hope Google’s browser is not for nerds only. Besides, even as a complete nerd myself I have better things to do in a browser than tracking processes – I think I will only be inclined to take a look if I notice speed decrease. So while it’s a valid suggestion for a certain type of tech-savvy users, I think it will hardly be applicable to a mainstream web audience.
And no, I have not noticed any attempt from Chrome to send the crash report back to Google – simply because at the time I was not opted in submitting reports.
@Ralph Grabowski: Interesting problem as well, twice as interesting with 2 Google services participating. Have you seen anyone reporting similar problems as well?
@EntrepreNerd: Sure, RAM overload must have played a role here and while I have not recorded ram usage data before Chrome crashed, I do think that I was much more moderate with memory. I believe I have less memory-consuming processes running: as of now Firefox consumes about 300 Mb with 60 (!) open tabs (I guess it’s because the vast majority of these tabs contain simple blog posts – something I’m going to read during the day). This is my usual mode of work during the day – I have 15-20 tabs open constantly with some new ones added and some older ones closed but the most memory-hungry ones are usually 3 or 4 applications, the rest of them are blog posts or articles. So you can see my Firefox is not particularly memory-hungry so it is hardly a matter of colliding the 2 browsers in one RAM space. And while I am not on 4 gigs of ram (2 only) but it did not seem like a RAM issue here – especially with other applications (including Firefox) running stably instead of crashing together with Firefox (like in your case).
@Scott: Thank you for support both with your own example and with the comment on user vs. software issues, I am really glad I’m not the only one feeling that even such an early-stage product should be able to cope with users’ needs more gracefully. What’s more, when it is Google launching something, we invariably expect it will be near-perfect, especially when Google claims it is near-perfect
I don’t really feel it is fair to compare Chrome to Firefox myself as the latter one is understandably much more mature but when a product is hyped so high, especially those very separate processes that are supposed to prevent the browser from crashes (let alone crashes of the entire OS – this sounds dangerous), we start to doubt if everything below the curtain is really as great as described. And that’s my major concern: when a user expects something extraordinary, he will be deeply disappointed when finding flaws.
I can agree with you 100% that we will soon see lots of things fixed by Google in the future releases but I think it will do Google no good that the browser is so much hyped now – it should have been better if those fanboys received clear warnings that the product is far from ready and should be considered as such so that they don’t try to make the world believe Chrome is the best browser ever. It has solid chances of becoming one (in my opinion) but it is obviously not there yet. And if it develops in the right direction, it will be mostly thanks to those users that are to blame here
I’ve found (and it appears others have as well according to a Google search) a verifiable, repeatable method to crash Chrome.
Simply type “chrome :%” in a shell and the “Whoa!” error message appears. It also works if you put the arguments I used into the address bar. That’s the only repeatable one I’ve found so far, but then I’m not really hammering it with a argument fuzzer on the cmd line. I’ll probably whip up a shell script over the weekend to just launch chrome and kill the PID, repeat with randomized characters as command line arguments.
@phil: I tend to think that any application can be crashed if you are really determined to do so. But the difference between your approach and mine is that I prefer to load apps with only the tasks they are supposed to do anyway and only get disappointed when they don’t perform in normal conditions. It’s an interesting pastime you have over there and hopefully you will help Google improve Chrome for the next release.
i’ve been using Chrome for about a day now and it seems to be a lot faster than FireFox or IE… hasn’t crashed for me yet, and i open dozens of tabs at a time
Yeah, my day job does leak over into my personal explorations at times. I do this kind of thing for a living (as a good guy), although usually I’m looking for a way to co-opt the process (which I haven’t tried so far, but the breakpoint for the error seems to be deterministic). I just found it interesting they didn’t sanitize the input from the command line or the address bar. Such is the lot of a *truly* beta program (as opposed to the “beta” status of GMail).
I agree this is pretty much a fringe case as far as most users are concerned. And regarding the “breaks under normal conditions”, yeah.. that irks me as well. But this is only version 0.2.149.7, so expect both your and my issue to disappear relatively quickly.
I think many of these kind of breakages are a case of programmers using their own usage scenarios as a base point for trapping errors, and not realizing that the real world is rarely that predictable. I see this a lot. Heck, it’s one of the reasons I have plenty of work.
As someone who regularly overloads Firefox (5 windows with over 500 tabs open at any time, exitted with session saved by SessionManager plugin and then session re-loaded on next start-up!!!), I can say I don’t expect this level of robustness from any other browser. Chrome version is 0.2.x.x. I had a few nightmarish experience with Firefox 2. Once it crashed and managed to delete all my bookmarks (not tabs, but bookmarks). So, if chrome does anything funky like that I’ll forgive come version 2 or 3, maybe even 1. So, far I have not had it crash (with minimal use I admit), except intentional crash using :% argument. Which is okay I think, I take it as one of those health-safe practical jokes from the Google engineers, so no problem there. But three things I have noticed so far:
1. There’s no block image option. It should be provided, as I definitely won’t even consider making Chrome my primary browser without it. I do not feel like seeing ad images and I want them blocked. (I haven’t figured out a way to block flah ads, so if someone have any idea, please post).
2. I noticed just continuous normal browsing got a single tab to consume more and more memory. I think what could be happening is the process keeps on loading up JavaScript code into its memory space. Is it necessary to do so? I think Chrome is being touted as a future OS, so it should better manage the memory allocation for its running code. Should implement some algorithm to flush out unused JavaScript code and reload them next time. Exactly what I saw was, the tab opened with about 5 MB allocated. As soon as I loaded up this site http://www.cricinfo.com, it reached 10 MB. As I started surfing that site, browsing links (just that tab opened), at last count I saw that tab process reach 43 MB memory usage.
3. The memory usage reported by Chrome Task Manager is not consistent with that reported by windows (I use XP Pro SP3). It could be XP or could be Chrome, I don’t know which is the less enlightened one.
Anyways, and at any rate, I think Chrome is certainly revolutionary. My expectation of it will be nothing short of perfection once it’s in version 1 so best of luck to Google Chrome Engineers!!
@media boy: Lucky you are, I guess there must be a number of factors to take into account when speaking about various Chrome crashes, I have already seen quite a lot of different examples here and elsewhere. Some people are lucky, others are not.
@Phil: I see why you have started trying to crash Chrome now, obviously you must be interested to break everyone’s software if you do it for some company for a living
A very valid point about Chrome finally being a true “beta” program unlike Gmail. I guess Google has spoiled us with Gmail’s beta as we expect that beta should be fully-functional and stable anyway - and that’s why many users complain about Chrome unwilling to admit it’s an early beta. But I am quite sure Google will be fixing such bugs pretty fast and we will probably not see them as soon as in the next release.
You know, my own point is always that QA engineers should use help from real-life people, like putting a sister on the computer and asking her to use the software for a few hours as she would normally do. Such things are often very helpful - they help both understand typical user behavior and eliminate the first bugs to be noticed by users when launched to the public.
@Rahat: Wow, you are obviously one of the heaviest Firefox loaders I’ve ever heard of. And it is absolutely true: there’s no point in expecting a similar robustness from such an early beta as Google Chrome is.
You are definitely not the only one with the image/ad blocking issue but unfortunately since Google makes money off ads, I think it will not be fair to expect it to give users an easy way to avoid seeing ads.
Interesting example about memory usage, I have also noticed Chrome tends to consume more memory with time. But this one I think will be addressed as well since many users have complained about it already and Google will sure have a lot of things to work on in the coming weeks for the next release. And I myself tend to believe Windows’ task manager for memory information for now - not sure that a browser can have similar power in tracking memory allocation as an OS (BTW, I don’t understand all those arguments that Chrome is not a browser but an OS instead).
I support you 100% that it will be nearly perfect when ready - and will even appeal to mainstream users better at that point as well. But for now I don’t think it is needed to advertise it right on Google’s homepage as Chrome as it is certainly is a product for early adopters mostly.
just type these 2 characters in address tab of chrome
:%
did it crash ??
“:%” crash has been fixed in version 0.2.149.29
Chrome…yes disc reads all the time even when chrome not used…cure it by ending chrome exe in task manager. But then it starts up again when you use chrome again.
Repeatedly crashes with windows media player if you try n F11 for full screen. Cure…use firefox until proper version is out.
Looks to be a good idea though although no ‘home’ button makes it a bit of a loser. I like my own page back without scrabbling around tabs to find it.
You’re far from the world record - I managed to crash it in exactly 20 seconds, by choosing “Import bookmarks”
Chrome works breezily in my Windows XP SP2 machine
However, I haven’t tried 15 applications yet.
Chrome is still in its beta version. Great thing about this is that it’s actually an “open-source” web browser. Therefore, every nerd pal can contribute to the success of this browser. I have just installed it today and haven’t encountered any nightmarish experience yet… Well, not yet
As soon as I do, I’ll let you know and join the mob.
My copy of Google Chrome has something seriously wrong: It crashes on load. Of course, you can imagine, this is a Very Bad Thing, since it happens every time the browser opens from now on without fail…
Just try to open options,voila ,google chrome crashes immediately(on x64 systems)
I have a Dual Quad Core machine with 8 Gigs of RAM, running XP Pro 64 Bit and I crashed it in less that 2 minutes. I just tried to open up the options and Pow. Crash and Burn.
Actually, it is a bad browser. How does it help if it is version 3 or 1?!? Google usually plays the Beta trick when it is unsure of a product’s success. Gmail for example is still in Beta and its been around for how many years?!? It’s a bad product to be released, but to good a product to be withheld, so its in Beta.
@Roger: You must be very unlucky - with this type of machine I don’t think anyone will blame memory clogging. Still hope this feedback will help them fix something in the next release.
@amar: I think in this case they actually launched a product in beta because it was not reasonable to wait any longer. And the problem about users complaining is that we just got accustomed to the fact that beta for Google means an absolutely stable and working product - and Chrome does not fit in this expectation simply.
I’ve been using Google Chrome since the day it came out and, except for some sound issues with YouTube videos, it has been working extremely well for me. Not one crash. I do try to minimize the number of tabs I have open, so that might be why it’s working well for me. I’ve been surprised how stable it’s been for a beta.
@Jason: Thank you for the comment, it is rather extraordinary for this post where the majority of people report on various problems they have with the browser. But it is good to see positive feedback for Google - even though I guess negative is even better since it will help the team make the browser more robust and ready for us to use to its full power.
Chrome crashed on me while downloading a small images. It also crashed when I tried to upload a small image to a Coppermine gallery. It repeatedly crashed only when i try to do either of those things.
@Dana: I have not heard of that use case yet, sounds interesting. I actually use Chrome to publish blog posts (it’s just about perfect with Wordpress for some reason) and upload tons of images and it never crashed on me because of this. Hopefully reports such as yours will help them identify the reason for the problem.
I crashed it running nothing more than gmail and google reader in two separate windows and got the Whoa!…message. At the time my ISP went down and it may have been that which caused it to crash (?) even though I’ve never heard of a browser crashing because your Internet goes out temporarily.
I deleted it from my system and did a reinstall and, it’s still crashed. Must be loading some files cashed in my computer somewhere that I don’t know about. Too bad, it was a lot of fun while it lasted.
@Owen: You know what, I’ve been using it for almost a week quite often for a few things (Google applications mostly) and I tried to ignore minor glitches that happened after the major crash described in this post. But my current opinion is that maybe I should give Google more time to come up with a stable version as the security risks in the browser seem to be too dangerous for me to keep using it as it is. True, it is fast and quite fun but I guess some patience will not hurt now.
Svetlana: yes, I’m already back to FFox and Opera. I use them for different things. We’ll see what happens but for now I am gone from g-chrome. Best regards.
Owen, same here, I’ll stick to Firefox without venturing to Chrome any more until I know it is safe. Thanks for the comments!
i cant scroll up in google chrome….. with my touch pad…. but scrolling down is possible….
Jibran, interesting bug, have not heard of it myself, it seems like scrolling both up and down works just fine for me here in Chrome.
I have x64 XP and just chose ‘options’ and whoa! Whole thing crashes!
Tried reinstalling etc.. happens every time and is perfectly repeatable..
Even in beta an app from a company like Google should be better than that.
Maybe I’ll look again in a few months, but for now its Firefox all the way!
..and that’s with no pages even opened!
Yes it Crashes very often
Every time I try to close the tab that I am currently in google chrome crashes, which is a shame because I like it alot but the frequent crashes are annoying
Total crash many times here too. I was so excited to read that single tabs would crash, guess not so much.
Looks like google is going the way of every other tech company and just making stuff up.
Hi,
I have read most of the comments here regarding Google Chrome. I am very much impressed with Svetlana and the way she tried to give Unbiased opinion in detail.
Ofcourse, we all have issues with Every Browser, and hopefully looking forward to have them fixed.. (I had been irritated with IE and Mozilla and since the time Chrome had been launched, this had been my usual Browser unless it has any dependency on Product and Version).
I face only one issue, if I leave Chrome window unused (after opening few tabs) Performance of my Laptop goes down, and I can only get everything back once I close down Chrome. Also, few websites doesnot Support Chrome at this point.. So, apart from this Chrome does work fine and indeed better than few other Browsers in terms of Speed.
At the end, it is individual’s perception as well.
@Vamsi, thanks a lot for the comment and a special thank you for reading all the comments here - it is just amazing.
It is quite understandable that we have and will continue to have problems with every piece of software we have installed. The only thing that matters is that the value this software provides should outweigh our dissatisfaction over problems encountered.
By the way, I have also had this problem with performance damaged when Chrome is left idle for a while. But lately I have not experienced this since after the last crash I was unable to launch the browser again - so I myself am still waiting for a stabler version to arrive.
Google Chrome is an early beta so it can’t be compared to any other browser, although,I’ve have had no problems with it thus far, but for all of you, the latest release of Google Chrome (0.2.149.30) should solve all of your problems. To update your version of Google Chrome, simply click the wrench icon, then click About Google Chrome. Google Chrome will also be completely stable when the release after the previously mentioned one is released. Google Chrome has a DEV channel which has major upgrades and updates/new versions to Google Chrome every 1-2 weeks. Also, Google Chrome releasing 10+ new builds of their browser every day adding new support, features, and fixes etc. Google Chrome also automatically updates itself.
ITz such ever disappointing _ its most of the time crashed.
evertime i open it now…it crashes after 2-3 seconds.. damn.
i had just reinstalled my OS
I used Chrome for a few days and it was fine… but nowadays it crashes all the time;
- with no other tabs open trying to download a single file - CRASHES
- trying to open a bookmark from the toolbar - CRASHES
yes it’s not all the time, but it is defintely a few times a day… and yes its no firefox 3 and it is in beta, but really it feels like it is in alpha.. sorry i left you my red fox, please take me back.
I really liked the simplicity of Chrome, but it is incredibly unstable
The first time I use it in an session it seems fine, but as I open and close it over the session it becomes increasingly unstable. Crashing if I close a tab; try to download, in fact do anything other than open a new tab.
Then if I reboot the PC it becomes stable again … for a while.
Just thought you might like to be notified but I too was having two fundamental crash points within Chrome on XP x64.
Clicking on the star to create a bookmark for the current page and also selecting Options.
I also had an issue with running 32bit IE on this box…
The solution was easy, remove Logitech SetPoint utility from memory and its as stable as hell!!
I can’t close the ‘Options’ screen in Chrome. It crashes the browser. I’ve reproduced this on two of my Windows XP computers now. It’s a little frustrating.
Google Chrome messed up my entire outlook Express mail system.
Had to rework entire system to open links from my email.
Used Desktop Maestro, System Mechanic and CCleaner + manual removal to rid my computer of this , obviously, beta product
It’s not even Beta. It’s not ready for release, especially after all of the crashes incurred by this “product”.
It’s interesting to read all these comments about crashes. None of the specific usage mentioned here as a surefire way to crash Chrome has worked for me. I.e. Chrome has not crashed for me too often, granted I don’t make extensive use of it yet. I am on XP Pro. The only reason I won’t make it my primary browser now, is being unable to block images. And even if Google decides to add that feature, only way I will move from Firefox to Chrome is if I have the ability to really control everything. One missing feature in Firefox I’d really like to see in Chrome, is the ability to pause execution of a plugin. So, for example the flash player, I would like it to run or not, or be able to pause it or stop it for the duration of a session (regardless of the page reloads) etc. for a site, group of sites or all sites. I think Google is on a great journey with Chrome and I hope the ability to fully control what the browser executes (including JavaScript, AJAX i.e. anything and everything) would be a great thing.