On the same day that Google announced at their I/O Developer Conference that their Chrome web browser would finally see the light of day on the iPhone and iPad, comes confirmation from the company that that same browser has been causing serious problems with other Apple devices: Apple's new wave of MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs.
In a statement released to tech site Gizmodo, Google confirmed that the rampant reports of freezing and crashing MacBooks were the result of existing incompatibilities between their browser and the MacBooks' OS. Their statement read:
"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."
While Google admits that the issue is being triggered by Chrome, it's also apparent in their statement that they are placing much of the blame for the crashes at the feet of Apple, by emphasizing that such application errors should not be capable of crashing an entire OS, and that they've sent a bug report for Apple to go over.
The issue appears to be affecting all recent models of the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air which were released within the past month, and are running Intel 4000 HD graphics. No other browsers have been reported to have such problems with the new wave of MacBooks.
If you're a Chrome fan, you may just have to bite the bullet and switch over to Safari, Firefox, or IE for a few days until Google and Apple can resolve the issue.
