A number of MacBook Air users have been complaining about their MacBooks crashing unexpectedly while they were using their laptops. The reason behind the problem was confirmed officially with Google announcing that the crashing is being caused by Google Chrome. Google also said that an immediate fix for the problem has been made, and that they will be providing a complete fix soon.

Some of the analysts had earlier reported that some random actions in Google Chrome were causing kernel crashes in the MacBooks; this view has been confirmed by Google. MacBook Air owners have been getting persistent kernel panics while they work with the tabs and windows of Google Chrome; that is, when they close or manage windows.

Since the bug caused kernel panics, it resulted in system crashes, requiring reboot, rather than just resulting in the closing of the browser. Google also said that the problem was not completely with the browser, but also with some drivers of Apple.

“We have identified a leak of graphics resources in the Chrome browser related to the drawing of plugins on Mac OS X. Work is proceeding to find and fix the root cause of the leak.

The resource leak is causing a kernel panic on Mac hardware containing the Intel HD 4000 graphics chip (e.g. the new Macbook Airs). Radar bug number 11762608 has been filed with Apple regarding the kernel panics, since it should not be possible for an application to trigger such behavior.

While the root cause of the leak is being fixed, we are temporarily disabling some of Chrome’s GPU acceleration features on the affected hardware via an auto-updated release that went out this afternoon (Thursday June 28). We anticipate further fixes in the coming days which will re-enable many or all of these features on this hardware.”

If you are still facing any issues, you can try the developer release of Google Chrome for your Mac; or just use Safari or Firefox or any other browser of your choice till the issue is fixed.

[via CNET]