Why is Google Chrome crashing?

MUMBAI, INDIA: Has Google Chrome been bugged?

According to a post on popular bulletin board site Reddit, a bug in Google’s Chrome browser makes it incredibly easy to crash.

As per the post, the browser becomes unresponsive, crashes and then disappears from the running process list. One just has to enter a 16-character string— ‘http://a/%%30%30’ into the browser address field and the latest version of Chrome on Windows to crash.

In fact, even hovering the mouse over this particular link could cause that browser tab to crash, most likely due to the page preloading mechanism that Chrome tends to utilize. The bug appears to be due to the manner in which the parameters in the characters are processed.

However, there are versions of Chrome on other platforms such as Android and Mac that are resilient to this vulnerability. The bug has also been found to affect certain other browsers based on the Webkit platform such as the Blackberry browser, reports DNA.

Not just Chrome, this bug affects certain versions of the Opera browser as well. Although does not have any adverse effect on Internet Explorer, Edge and Firefox.