I have not really noticed any crashes or hangs in Google Chrome, or other web browsers for that matter, in recent time. That said, I do know of a few users who are experiencing crashes in the browser, either because they emailed me asking for help, or because I know them personally and they have mentioned issues to me.

Even though Chrome is running fine for the majority of users, it too has issues of its own. From too high memory usage to sound issues and ads in the browser to the dreaded Oops! Google Chrome could not connect to error.

Chrome users may experience crashes when they are running third party software that is not compatible with the web browser. It can be that an older version is outdated, or that even the latest version of an application is not compatible with the browser.

Software incompatibilities are the primary reason for crashes and hangs in the Chrome browser. Many of the issues can be resolved with updates, but since you do not know which program to update, it is recommended to update them all. Try a program like the software updates monitor Sumo to find out which of your programs need updating.

Usually it is an app that is running at the time Chrome is running or an app that is somehow integrated into the browser. This can be a security software, a download manager, or a desktop app that runs all the time on the computer.

The following list highlights applications that may cause Chrome to crash or hang.

• Internet Download Manager (IDM) – This issue is caused by outdated versions of Internet Download Manager. If you are running IDM 6.02 or earlier, you may experience crashes in the Google Chrome web browser. To resolve, update the program to the latest version (at the time of writing that is 6.12). You can alternatively disable advanced browser integration under Options > General in IDM.
• Asus EeePC print crash – Asus EeePC owners that have Asus WebStorage installed my experience print crashes in Chrome. This too is caused by an outdated program version which you can resolve by updating Web Storage to the latest version.
• Stopzilla (iS3 Anti-Spyware) may cause Chrome to crash. Google suggests to update the program to the latest version to see if it resolves the issue. If not, disabling or uninstalling is an option.
• NVIDIA Network Access Manager is incompatible with Chrome. Suggested actions are to temporarily disable the software
• The performance optimization and monitoring application NVIDIA nTune is incompatible with Google Chrome. Temporarily disabling may resolve the issue.
• NVIDIA Desktop Explorer is also incompatible with Google Chrome. This is caused by the nvshell.dll which you may want to remove from the system. Alternatively, disable or uninstall the desktop manager.
• ESET Nod32 Antivirus – Earlier versions of the antivirus software are incompatible. If you are running version 2.7 or earlier you may notice crashes in Chrome. Solution: update to the latest version or disable Internet monitoring.
• Hide My IP may cause crashes in Google Chrome. Disable for the time being or check for updates to see if it resolves the crash issues.
• Venturi Firewall can crash Chrome as well. Try updating the desktop firewall to see if it resolves the issue. If not, disabling or uninstalling may be the only option if you want to continue using Chrome.
• WinMount, a program to compress and decompress archives and to mount archives on the system, appears to be incompatible with Chrome. You may try and update the software, or if that does not work, disable it instead.
• PPLive, a live video streaming software, may cause Chrome to hang or crash. To resolve, update to the latest version. If issues remain, disable the integration in Chrome.
• Folder Size
• Profile corruption. If Chrome crashes seconds after opening, or get “Aw Snao” error messages all the time, your profile may be corrupt. Follow the instruction posted here to create a new default profile to see if it resolves the issue.
• Other software that may crash Google Chrome: Safe Eyes Parental Control Software, ContentWatch, Microsoft Office XP Input Method Editor,Naomi Web Filter,Trusteer Rapport. Try updating first, if that does not help, disable or uninstall.

If you can’t find a solution and do not want to or can’t uninstall or disable the application causing the issue, you may want to post in the official Chrome support forum to get help with the issue.

If you are using Google Chrome 23 or higher you may have noticed a change to how website permissions are controlled in the browser. To do that in previous versions, you had to open the content settings of the browser to manage which websites could load images, cookies, JavaScript, handlers, plugins or popups and which could not. Chrome by default is configured to allow all contents but popups on all websites. You can use exceptions to forbid the use on select websites, or switch to blocking certain types of contents on all websites but on sites in your exception list.

Up until now you had two options to manage content settings. First by opening the content settings in the Chrome settings dialog, or, if contents are blocked on a site, with a click on the icon indicating this in the browser’s address bar.

This changes with Google Chrome 23 as you can now click on the security icon on the left of the web url in the browser’s address bar to display content settings right there.

The menu has been divided into two tabs, permissions and connection. The permissions tab displays cookie and site data information at the top, and below that all permissions of the website you are on.

Cookies and site data displays allowed and blocked first and third party cookies. A link to the cookie manager provides you with options to remove some or all of the cookies with just a few clicks.

Permissions let you change the following permissions for the domain you are on (allowed by default, always on, always blocked)

• Images
• JavaScript
• Plugins
• Popups
• Location
• Notifications
• Fullscreen
• Mouse Lock
• Media

Chrome users can now edit permissions for a single website directly in the main browser window instead of having to manage exceptions for content settings in the browser’s options. Changes take effect after you reload the page or navigate to a different page on the domain.

The security information have been moved to the connection tab instead. Only the domain name and whether the identity has been verified are displayed on both pages. All remaining security information are displayed on the connection page.

The ability to control permissions right from the page you are on makes the whole process easier to handle. Definitely an improvement for Chrome users who use the permission feature in the web browser.

Chrome: If you want to quickly glance at a link within a news article but don't want to click on it, SwiftPreview is a simple way to do it. When you hover over a link, SwiftPreview shows a graphic preview of the page linked, and the extension is fully customizable so you can keep it from being annoying. More »

Suggests you to ditch the Internet Explorer. Well, here is something to kick start your morning. According to one of the redditors, the New York Public Library suggests its uses to ditch IE and use Google Chrome instead.

When we launched Chrome four years ago, most people accessed the web through a personal computer. Our goal was to help build a better web--a web that is faster, simpler and more secure. 

Fast forward to today, and many people have more than one device--a smartphone, a tablet, a computer at work, a computer at home. The beauty of the web is that it’s the one platform that can deliver a consistent experience on any device with a browser. We've been working to build a more seamless Chrome experience that lets you to take your Chrome stuff with you on all your devices. 

The web isn’t the same for everyone--we all have our own individual bookmarks, tabs, history, passwords and more that reflect what we do online and what we care about. Chrome now enables you to access your web, everywhere. Whether you’re on a Windows, Mac, or Linux computer, a Chromebook, or an Android or iOS smartphone or tablet, you can have the same consistent experience no matter where you go, just by signing in to Chrome. 

As you use Chrome on more devices, we remain focused on providing you with the most secure web experience possible. Building on four years of security work, recent improvements such as more robust plug-in sandboxing andSafe Browsing for downloads ensure that your browsing is more secure than ever before. 

To track Chrome’s journey from a better web to your web, we created a Chrome Time Machine (of sorts) that lets you travel through key moments in Chrome’s history over the past four years. You may even uncover a special birthday gift from the Chrome team, if you find the hidden clue and type in the secret code... 

Thank you all for being a part of Chrome, and for bringing your own personal touch to the web. On our fourth birthday, we’re looking forward to many more amazing years of helping you do more online. Happy browsing!

As the summer passes by, it’s time to find out, how exactly did your favorite web browser perform in the month of August. Starting with the Internet Explorer, we resume the long and unsurprising downtrend, down from 53.93% to 53.60% (0.33 point decrease). After a couple of good months, Firefox too continues its downtrend, down [...]

Today is Labor Day in the United States. It's a federal holiday dedicated to the American workforce, celebrating, as the U.S. department of labor puts it, the "contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country."

Every year, the Labor Day holiday falls very closely to the anniversary of Google's launch of the beta version of the Google Chrome Web browser. Released on September 1, 2008, Google Chrome is now four years old, and I am taking the opportunity on this holiday to celebrate the workhorse that is Chrome.

Chrome is my pickup truck

The first graphical Web browser I ever used was Netscape Navigator. This was in 1994, and it was on X11-based SGI workstations at the UMBC computer lab where my older brother was studying Computer Science. After eighteen years and two so-called browser wars, I can say with a certain amount of confidence that I no longer derive any personal identity from the browser I use.

For many, browsers are like cars. They serve not only as a tool for transportation, but they also serve as an identity for the driver. The appearance of the vehicle, the style in which he uses the vehicle, and the aftermarket customizations are all points of pride for drivers and browsers alike. Yet at this point in my life, the browser I use is purely utility, and if it can't do what I need, I am not even going to try to fix it. I'm just going to use something else. It's a pickup truck.

That is why I'm still using Chrome today. Four years ago, when I started testing the beta of Chrome, my daily browser was Opera and I was more or less satisfied with it. Of course, it couldn't do everything, and I had to keep both Internet Explorer and Firefox installed for those occasions where I encountered something Opera couldn't handle.

The beta of Chrome also encountered things it couldn't handle, and it lacked a lot of the shortcuts that I'd gotten used to in Opera. Yet the simplicity of the UI, omnibox, settings management, and built-in security of Chrome were all appealing. In Chrome's public beta period between September and December 2008, I found that I still had to open other browsers to get my work done, but Opera wasn't one of them. Chrome simply slid in as the default window through which I'd view the Web. It wasn't until recently that I've found I can get by without ever opening another browser. I've stuck with Chrome, and my behaviors have been molded to it.

Four more years

In addition to being near Labor day, this particular Chrome Anniversary falls in an election year, so It's a good time to see what Google has done for Chrome in the first four years.

In the first year, Google provided a grand total of 51 developer updates, 21 beta updates and 15 stable updates to Chrome, and pushed some 3,505 bug fixes. In July 2009, Google announced the concept of Chrome OS. Then, upon Chrome's first anniversary, Google introduced an overhauled UI with skinnability, a refreshed "new tab" page, and new HTML5 capabilities.

In the second year, Google finalized and released Mac and Linux versions of Chrome, debuted side-by-side view, autofill, password manager, bookmark and preference sync, and nearly 6,000 browser extensions. Upon Chrome's second anniversary, Google released a version with an even further stripped-down UI.

Moving into the third year, we got to actually see Chrome as a full operating system, first with the CR-48 pilot program, and then with Samsung's Chromebooks and Chromeboxes. During Chrome's third year, Google added a new settings interface, a new Javascript engine, "Print to PDF" functionality, the Chrome Web App store and in-app payments, hardware-accelerated browsing, and much more.

Cross-posted on the Google Developers Blog

At Google, we are constantly looking at ways to make web pages load faster. One way to do this is by making web images smaller. This is especially important for mobile devices where smaller images save both bandwidth and battery life. Earlier this month, we released version 0.2 of the WebP library that adds support for lossless and transparency modes to compress images. This version provides CPU and memory performance comparable to or better than PNG, yet results in 26% smaller files.

WebP’s improved compression comes from advanced techniques such as dedicated entropy codes for different color channels, exploiting 2D locality of backward reference distances and a color cache of recently used colors. This complements basic techniques such as dictionary coding, Huffman coding and color indexing transform. We think that we've only scratched the surface in improving compression. Our newly added support for alpha transparency with lossy images promises additional gains in this space, helping make WebP an efficient replacement for PNG.

The new WebP modes are supported natively in the latest Beta version of Chrome. The bit stream specification for these new WebP modes has been finalized and the container specification has been updated. We thank the community for their valuable feedback and for helping us evolve WebP as a new image compression format for the web. We encourage you to try these new compression methods on your favorite set of images, check out the code, and continue to provide feedback.

As we have reported earlier, Google has decided to create a yet another JavaScript benchmark and after publishing some preliminary browser results from other sources, we have decided to do a test of our own. Web Browsers Internet Explorer 10 Release Preview (Build 10.0.8400.0) Firefox 14 (Version 14.0.1) Firefox 15 Beta 5 Google Chrome 23 [...]

Good news for the Google Chrome and especially Windows 8 users as the latest beta version of the search giant’s web browser has some neat goodies in store.

Chrome has a great feature that lets you select text and right-click it to search that term on Google. Drag & Drop Search is an extension that does something similar: You select text, then drag it somewhere on the page to search up to 16 different web sites. More »

For you game lovers out there, you’ll be happy to hear that today’s Beta release includes the Pointer Lock JavaScript API(a.k.a. mouse lock). This means 3D web apps and games like first-person shooters can remove your cursor from the screen and get access to raw mouse movement data, so you can pan the screen’s view to your heart’s content. You can play with this nifty WebGL Quake 3 map viewer to see it in action. Have fun!

Chrome/Firefox/Internet Explorer: Facebook Chat now includes a feature that lets you know when a friend has read your message—or when you've read theirs. If you'd prefer to keep that information under wraps, Chat Undetected will do it for you. More »

One theme we hear repeatedly from Chrome OS users is how much they enjoy the speed and simplicity of their Chromebooks. With this week’s stable release of Chrome OS, we’ve redesigned the apps list experience to make it easier to access your favorite apps and websites.

Notably, we made the apps list much more compact, so you can access your apps without interrupting your browsing experience. We also added a search box at the top of the apps list, which you can use like an omnibox to search the web, specific websites, or the apps on your computer.

This week’s stable release also includes visual improvements such as a redesigned Cloud Print dialog and the ability to add custom wallpaper (for example, a picture of your cute little morkie). You can now also save files directly to Google Drive, so you can access files later from any device, including Drive on iOS or Android. Under the hood, we’ve added audio support for USB and HDMI, additional sandboxing security features, and many more bug fixes. This is all part of our goal to make sure your Chromebook and Chromebox get better over time.

Still looking for a computer to bring back to school? Check out a Chromebook or Chromebox in person at a Chrome Zone near you, in a Best Buy store in the US or a PC World/Currys in the UK.

The web is evolving and so should the JavaScript benchmarks that measure its performance. Today, we are releasing Octane, a JavaScript benchmark suite that aims to measure a browser’s performance when running the complex and demanding web applications that users interact with daily.

Most of the existing JavaScript benchmarks run artificial tests that were created on an ad-hoc basis to stress a specific JavaScript feature. Octane breaks with this tradition and extends the former V8 Benchmark Suite with 5 new benchmarks created from full, unaltered [1], well-known web applications and libraries. A high score in the new benchmarks directly translates to better and smoother performance in similar web applications.

Here is an overview of the new tests:

• Box2DWeb runs a JavaScript port of a popular 2D physics engine that is behind many well-known simulations and web games. 
• Mandreel puts a JavaScript port of the 3D Bullet Engine to the test with a twist: The original C++ source code for the engine is translated to JavaScript by Onan Games’ Mandreel compiler, which is also used in countless web-based games. 
• Pdf.js is based on Mozilla’s PDF reader and shows how Javascript applications can replace complex native browser plug-ins. It measures how fast the browser decodes a sample PDF document. 
• GB Emulator is derived from an open source emulator of a famous game console running a 3D demo. 
• CodeLoad measures how quickly a JavaScript engine can bootstrap commonly used JavaScript libraries and start executing code in them. The source for this test is derived from open source libraries (Closure, jQuery). 

Besides an expanded set of benchmarks, Octane also has an interface that makes it easier to read and that adapts automatically to tablet and mobile screens.

You can try out Octane yourself, browse the source code, or read more about each benchmark at the Octane site. Still have some questions? Have a look at the FAQ page.

Or more… Even though Google has already paid more than $1 million dollars for bug reports, the search giant has recently announced that they will be increasing the budget for its Chromium Vulnerability Rewards Program. According to the official blog post, bug hunters will now receive a bonus of $1,000 or more for every security [...]

The first Pwnium competition held earlier this year exceeded our expectations. We received two submissions of such complexity and quality that both of them won Pwnie Awards at this year’s Black Hat industry event. Most importantly, we were able to make Chromium significantly stronger based on what we learned.

We’re therefore going to host another Pwnium competition, called... Pwnium 2. It will be held on Oct 10th, 2012 at the Hack In The Box 10 year anniversary conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

This time, we’ll be sponsoring up to $2 million worth of rewards at the following reward levels:

• $60,000: “Full Chrome exploit”: Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence using only bugs in Chrome itself. 
• $50,000: “Partial Chrome exploit”: Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence using at least one bug in Chrome itself, plus other bugs. For example, a WebKit bug combined with a Windows kernel bug. 
• $40,000: “Non-Chrome exploit”: Flash / Windows / other. Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence that does not use bugs in Chrome. For example, bugs in one or more of Flash, Windows or a driver. 
• $Panel decision: “Incomplete exploit”: An exploit that is not reliable, or an incomplete exploit chain. For example, code execution inside the sandbox but no sandbox escape; or a working sandbox escape in isolation. For Pwnium 2, we want to reward people who get “part way” as we could definitely learn from this work. Our rewards panel will judge any such works as generously as we can. 

Exploits should be demonstrated against the latest stable version of Chrome. Chrome and the underlying operating system and drivers will be fully patched and running on an Acer Aspire V5-571-6869 laptop (which we’ll be giving away to the best entry.) Exploits should be served from a password-authenticated and HTTPS Google property, such as App Engine. The bugs used must be novel i.e. not known to us or fixed on trunk. Please document the exploit.

You may have noticed that we’ve compressed the reward levels closer together for Pwnium 2. This is in response to feedback, and reflects that any local account compromise is very serious. We’re happy to make the web safer by any means -- even rewarding vulnerabilities outside of our immediate control.

Another well-received piece of feedback from the first Pwnium was that more notice would have been nice. Accordingly, we’re giving about two months notice. We hope this gives enough time for the security community to craft more beautiful works, which we’d be more than happy to reward and celebrate.

Chrome: Amazon has released an official Send to Kindle extension for Google Chrome that allows you to send any web articles directly to your Kindle device in one click. More »