Watch Out For This Text That Kills Chrome On A Mac

Watch Out For This Text That Kills Chrome On A Mac

Do not click on the link in the next paragraph if you are using Chrome on a Mac. Or you can, but it will immediately cause the tab that the link opens in to crash. The page contains a special string of 13 characters, which make Chrome for Mac go haywire.

This link actually points to the open bug ticket on the Chromium product which details the issue. Dug up by Venture Beat, the ticket describes the bug in humorously terse language. (We’ve redacted the actual code to keep from crashing your browser.)

What steps will reproduce the problem?

1. Any page with REDACTED will crash the chrome tab on a Mac

2. Just create any dummy page with the unicode characters, and the Mac Chrome tab will crash hard

What is the expected result?

Expect it not to crash

What happens instead?

It crashes

If you’re not using the typeface that contains those characters, they will just show up as a bunch of rectangles. What they are actually supposed to look like what you see below, per Venture Beat. I have no idea what they actually mean, if anything.

Watch Out For This Text That Kills Chrome On A Mac

Of course, there is plenty of trolling YOU SHOULD NOT DO with these characters. Like using them to headline a blog post or Tweeting them out or dropping them in the comments or emailing them to the entire company (which, at least for us, did not work) or posting them to Facebook or emailing it to your mum with the subject line “important: emergency”. [Chromium via Venture Beat]


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