Chrome Frequently Crashing on macOS | Hacker News Reader

Chrome Frequently Crashing on macOS

18 pointsnomilk14 comments

About once a day while using chrome on macOS (Ventura) I'll see the mac spinning pinwheel and it won't let me change tabs. I close chrome entirely and can restart tabs. Once I waited 10 minutes and it was still showing the pinwheel and I couldn't change tabs.

I initially thought it might be unique to my laptop, but yesterday it happened on an almost fresh install of sonoma on a work laptop. So I'm leaning toward it being a chrome thing rather than a 'me' thing.

Anyone else?

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I've been hunting for a solution for this for weeks. The Chrome team said they fixed it and locked their support thread frustratingly.

It seems to occur most often when I am switching from one app to Chrome with Chrome in full screen mode. I do not have the issue if I use Chrome in a window.

When the pinwheel does come up, it usually helps to navigate away and click on an empty desktop, then come back. Interestingly enough when I do that, I occasionally notice a "this program is recording your screen notification" in the status bar.

I actually gave up on Chrome because of this issue, but reinstalled it after noticing some of the other browsers lacking some of Chrome's unique features

> it usually helps to navigate away and click on an empty desktop, then come back

Solved for me! Thanks! (my previous solution was to force quit chrome, which stopped everything I was doing in its tracks).

Chrome is not having a great time on Sonoma: https://twitter.com/siracusa/status/1726248785683321050

Some users say that its gone after reinstalling the OS, but I have zero energy to do that... :)

Just happened to me on Sonoma 14.1.1 (23B81), which was the latest available as of 2 days ago, but I notice another update (Sonoma 14.1.2) is now available.

EDIT: just updated to 14.1.2 (23B92). Hopefully it stops happening. Will report back if it happens again.

Do you have some bad extensions, maybe? It hasn't crashed on me in a long, long time. I can remember it crashing maybe like 2 or 3 times in the last five years, across several different Macs, both work and personal, Intel and Apple Silicon.

Some external device (special webcam? mic? bluetooth?) that maybe doesn't play well with the browser access requests?

Maybe you can dig through the crash logs...

https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6271277?hl=en

The fresh install had zero extensions. An no unusual bluetooth or other devices. The crashes happen with and without external monitor so not sure it's that. Thanks for the crash logs link, wasn't aware of those but will check next time it happens.

FYI you might have to turn it on beforehand, and it might send logs to Google: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/96817?sjid=53683799...

This has been happening to me as well for the last few weeks. I’d say since around the time Sonoma was released, although I’ve continued running Ventura the entire time. There was an update to Ventura at the time Sonoma was released, which I’ve considered as a possible cause.

I experience the same spinning wheel that rarely if ever resolves on its own, but I’ve noticed that if I click outside of the Chrome window to change focus to another app, and then immediately click back into a Chrome window, the spinning wheel is immediately resolved.

I have the same issue on Edge, Edge Beta and Edge Dev.

I thought that was a MsEdge issue. Happy to learn it's a chromium one.

Related, I'm having this "ERR_NETWORK_CHANGED" 10% of the time (https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/7442) and I don't even use a VPN. Browsing just became enfuriating...

Do you have a lot of tabs open? The one time I ran into something similar was out of memory issues

I do have quite a few open, perhaps a few dozen but not more than 50-60. It’s on a MacBook Pro with 96GB memory so I don’t think memory should be a problem, although I might check periodically to see if I can spot anything unusual.

I've seen this on multiple Chrome-based browsers (Edge, Brave, Chrome) and it happens so much I've switch from Brave to Safari as my regular browser.

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