The 13 damn characters that will make Chrome crash on OS X

Chrome-crash-characters-13-0

Browsers are complex applications that use a lot of third-party software and resources as a plug-in to play specific content or simply to function. This is why sometimes the dumbest things are the ones that may not have been considered a failure and cause the application to stop working.

This is the case of Chrome on Mac, as this week, a developer discovered that a simple 13 character string makes the tab that we have open in the browser instantly hang and return an error message like the one you have in the image above.

Chrome-crash-characters-13-1

It's funny that this problem is only reduced to OS X and yet not the same in Windows. For this reason if you use Chrome on Mac and want to check the problem simply clicking on this link you can see the error message.

The thirteen characters in question appear to be in Assyrian, so many users will only see rectangles instead of the error tab.

Chrome-crash-characters-13-2

The developer who found this curious bug in the browser states:

This is not only anecdotal, it could also be serious, you just have to think of someone spamming thanks to this bug with a message through Hangouts / Gmail and getting Chrome browsers. It could also be published on Facebook and force close all Chrome browsers on Mac that visit it

Most of the text that the most popular online services load do it differently to avoid these types of problems. That said, an attacker could certainly exploit this vulnerability to create a little 'chaos' among less advanced users.


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