Chrome Has Gone To Hell

Hardware and technical stuff
#1

I really like Chrome, but Google has really effed it up in the latest version.

  1. On my Mac, Chrome is autoquitting like crazy when I open a new tab. Not every time, but maybe a third of the time. It’s not crashing, because I’m not getting a crash report and Chrome doesn’t offer to reopen the tabs when it starts up again, but it’s like I hit Command-Q and shut Chrome down. It was making browsing a goddamn headache. Googled the symptoms and found out that it’s happening to a ton of people.

  2. On my PC, Chrome is freezing my system up. The only way to fix it is to hold the power button and shut down. I was afraid I was having some kind of hardware failure, but then I Googled the symptoms and discovered, yes, it’s been doing that to a whole lot of other people, and for a while, too.

As far as I can tell, both problems have to do with Chrome’s implementation of Flash.

So I’ve gone back to Safari and IE10 for now. But Google needs to get it together.

#2

Chrome + Flash used to crash (not even bluescreen, just completely froze) my win7 notebook nearly everyday.

I’m not having many problems with Chrome on OSX. Have you tried a plugin that blocks Flash?

#3

In my experience with Chrome problems, they are very idiosyncratic and machine-specific. There’s no problem with Chrome on OSX – there’s a problem with Chrome on your computer.

For a while, I couldn’t get Chrome to run on my work computer without totally flaking out and dying all the time; but it worked perfectly fine on a few other computers. Later, it started working on my work computer after a Chrome update.

It’s frustrating when you end up with a bad-Chrome experience, but it’s not really indicative of anything larger beyond Chrome’s oddly temperamental nature.

#4

Anytime I have an issue with Chrome I switch to the beta version and then when an issue pops up there I switch back to stable. So far this strategy has worked great, but I have only had a couple of issues over the lifetime of Chrome.

#5

I’ve installed Chrome many times over the years, and generally it tends to just stop working, so I remove it. Then when I remove it I can’t open links any more in Steam or other place, because Chrome likes to take over. I’ve had to update the registry on many a PC to fix that particular issue, both at work and at home. I’m sort of done with Chrome. To be honest I’ve never had a problem with IE8 or 9 and am using IE10 (Desktop) at home without any issues at all. It just works, and that’s all I really care about.

#6

Chrome on my windows 8 machine can’t play YouTube video for shit. Locks up my whole browser with fullscreen and often the controls on the bottom of videos become unresponsive. Still using it, because otherwise it’s fine, but still… If I wasn’t using the bank-only browser strategy with IE I’d probably switch over to it for reliability’s sake. Using FF for misc stuff at work, but I feel worse about FF than Chome-that-can’t-run-YouTube, for no very particular reason.

#7

By the way, for Chrome flash problems, go to the plugins page and click on details to look at versions. You may have multiple conflicting flash versions installed. Disable all but one. Then disable all the crap plugins you didn’t even know were there…

#8

I’ve been dealing with Chrome freezing for at least 3 months now. My problem has to do specifically with disqus and whenever I sign into a site with it on, the first time going there causes my computer to freeze. Other then not signing on I haven’t been able to find a way to fix it.

#9

Lately Chrome has started spawning intrusive popup ads all over the place. I thought my computer was infected with malware, but the other browsers are fine AND all my other computers with Chrome are doing the same thing. WTF, Google?

#10

I just started getting a few Chrome problems which I think are connected to syncing multiple accounts over time in the same browser session. I haven’t had any problems with disqus that I’m aware of, however.

There’s a procedure they recommend for fixing some Chrome problems without actually doing a full uninstall/reinstall:

  • Find the “default” user data folder (on Windows 7 it should be in: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Users\you\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data).

  • Rename “default” to be “Backup default”, and restart Chrome. Now you are back to having a vanilla browsing experience.

  • Log in to Google and sync again to recover your bookmarks, extensions, and saved passwords and stuff, assuming you’ve been syncing them in the first place. If not using sync, first export and then import your bookmarks but I think you’re SOOL for passwords and you’ll have to load the extensions again from the source.

You can find this procedure explained in some obscure chrome help page which I found from a link from the “oh snap” page it shows when something goes badly wrong. On that help page it tells you where “default” can be found on other OS apart from Windows 7.

#11

Haven’t seen that myself.

#12

Did you install a bad extension? I guarantee there’s nothing with Chrome itself that would cause it to do this.

#13

No such luck, only 1 flash player version 11.6 r602… Also, this little trip has proved pretty annoying – settings menu includes a tab for extensions, but nothing at all about plugins. Not even when you click “developer mode” on extensions, or “Show Advanced Settings” on the settings page. Should be a better way of taking a look at your plugins than ‘google it, then read Q&A until someone mentions chrome://plugins’

#14

This is very true. The whole magic browser-protocol URL feature needs obvious and easily accessible documentation, but plugins is the worst culprit, since it should be a menu item in the former-gear and now whatever-the-hell-those-three-lines-are menu.

#15

I didn’t install any new extensions. The problem does seem to get better when I disable all my extensions. But most of them were already disabled - the only ones I use are pretty trustworthy (Evernote, Lastpass, and Zotero). Is it possible for an extension to become infected? And can disabled extensions (I have a lot of them) still affect Chrome?

#16

It can also be helpful to update your video drivers if you haven’t recently on Windows. Hardware acceleration in Flash frequently goes to shit.

#17

I’m pretty sure I’ve managed to get to that page via the settings menu before. After some looking around:
Settings -> Show advanced settings -> [Privacy] Content Settings -> [Plugins] Disable individual plugins

#18

My chrome browser (pc) just updated a second ago, and now everything totally sucks. And it’s ugly. And I hate everybody. What is this shit? I know it’s free, and that Firefox exists… but I hate change just for the sake of change.

#19

Unfortunately web-based app PMs all share the deliciously misguided belief that they are employed for some good reason, and one way they keep their jobs is through a periodic redesign. Adds a bullet on the CV, too.

#20

I seem to have the update and I barely notice any changes. What should I be aware of?