If you are a Mac owner and normally use the Chrome browser, then know, that this special string of 13 characters can cause your tab in Chrome for OS X to crash immediately. Although these special text characters don’t have any effect on Windows, Android, or iOS running systems, but for Mac computers, it will break down any tab or at least current tab of the Chrome browser.
Google is aware with this Chrome crash vulnerability as open-source project Chromium project has already been reported this.
If you are using a Mac computer, then you are advised NOT to click on the link as this can crash your Chrome browser tab instantly. This link actually shows the bug report on the Chromium product describing the issue in detail.
Here are the steps that you need to follow in order to reproduce the problem:
- Chrome tab on the Mac system will crash instantly when any web page with [that special character] gets loaded.
- Try to create any dummy web page with the Unicode characters and instantly you will see that the Mac Chrome tab gets crashed hard.
What was expected here is that it should not crash, but unfortunately it does. VentureBeat reports that even the tab showing the news article also crashes for many users. According to the developer who discovered this bug-
“This is pretty serious. You could imagine someone spamming this message in Hangouts/Gmail and just straight-up force crashing all Mac Chrome browsers,”
Although this problem seems to be very simple, but in reality it is not. Anyone can post this 13-characters string on Facebook walls or timelines and it will crash all the Mac Chrome browsers that saw 13-characters string.
As reported by VentureBeat, Chrome crashes don’t happen every time. In many cases Mac users see 13 blank rectangles instead of crash. At present the cause behind such a Chrome crash while page rendering is still not known, but it is being recommended not use theses characters either on Twitter or on Facebook or anywhere else publicly.
Type chrome: //crashes into the Chrome address bar and press Enter in order to view the list of crashes that had occurred previously.
