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Google Chrome Crashes and Burns

While I have had my issues with Google on a few occassions I was optimistic to try out Google Chrome as I mentioned yesterday.  I waited till about noon and fired up VMWare Fusion at work on my MacBook Pro and installed Chrome without issue on Windows XP. It seemed to work ok, although the initial reviewson Chrome left much to be desired, and at least left Firefox the speed king. I thought I would give it a shot when I got home from work and the gym so I fired up my trusty Dell desktop and Windows Vista and installed it. The machine itself is about a year and a half old with a Duo 2 processor and 2 gigs of RAM on the 32 bit version of Vista. After installation I’m immediately greeted with:



Wow that’s not good. What happened? I read Matt Cutt’s blog entry today, which in part touted how stable it was, and not full of bugs. Part of his self Q&A mentioned:

Q: This is going to be some buggy, crashing piece of beta download, isn’t it?
A: No, I don’t really think so. Google determined one million pages that users are likely to surf to. Then a piece of software known as “ChromeBot” ran a torture test by loading those one million pages that we crawled for every new build of Google Chrome. This is a smart testing methodology because this real-world torture test quickly highlighted which bugs were most important to fix and helped determine priorities for the most important bugs. So Google Chrome has already been
automatically “fuzz tested” on tons of web pages. Google Chrome is very robust against anything the web can throw at it. If I had to guess where the browser might crash, it would be because we haven’t seen Google Chrome run across all the weird, wild hardware that runs Windows. But I’ve been using Google Chrome for months with essentially no crashes; it’s been rock-solid for me.

Now I wasn’t expecting a rock solid piece of software, but at least the ability to launch the browser, and navigate to a website I thought was within reach. I understand that testing one million pages is quite a feat, but ensuring that the application can be installed on a run of the mill Dell computer with Vista might be helpful as well. Clicking “Ok’ on the error message just left me with the following:

I appreciate the humor that Google put on the sad face, but all it did was leave me frustrated. Rebooting didn’t solve the problem, either did un-installing and reinstalling. After I sent a message to Google letting them know about the problem I haven’t found much about the problem online so far. So here I sit eager to play around with Google’s first attempt at a web browser, but unable to do so because of error messages and sad faces that leave me reminisicent of the days of the sad Mac icon:

Has anyone else had any issues with Google Chrome, either during installation or while utilizing the browser? Update: This issue has been somewhat resolved and you can read about it here.

  1. Manoj
    September 2nd, 2008 at 21:06 | #1

    I installed Chrome on a Windows XP SP2 box the app failed to start. It crashes throwing an error saying application failed to initialize (with some memory address) click OK to terminate the application. It is really frustrating..

  2. Adi
    September 3rd, 2008 at 00:16 | #2

    Yes, I have precisely the same problem.
    “application fails to start”
    0xc0000005 error + sad face

    :(

  3. cbgb
    September 3rd, 2008 at 08:00 | #3

    Couldn’t scroll upward.
    Slow.
    Crashed.
    Surfed to a youtube page with a video to show the features of Chrome and the video stalled within Chrome = sad face.
    We’ll wait to try again.

  4. Greg
    September 3rd, 2008 at 08:11 | #4

    I feel your pain, same problem. Does anyone know of a fix yet?

  5. Mike
    September 3rd, 2008 at 08:27 | #5

    I too have this same problem. Very disappointing.

  6. Insania2016
    September 3rd, 2008 at 08:45 | #6

    Yep, same error as everyone else and sent a note to Google.

  7. Mike
    September 3rd, 2008 at 08:50 | #7

    Add this to the shortcut –no-sandbox

  8. YoYo
    September 3rd, 2008 at 10:10 | #8

    Same problem for me..

  9. simon
    September 3rd, 2008 at 13:54 | #9

    its not only the chrome browser that crashed . the entire windows crashed with blue freezing window every time i open any application even after uninstalling chrome. the most devastating problem is that windows firewall and its registry was gone. performing repair with windows installation cd fixed the problem of blue windows but never fixed the problem of firewall
    i have dell inspiron 1525 with windows xp sp2 instlled

  10. Tony
    September 5th, 2008 at 09:27 | #10

    End point protection, yes that makes sense. I’ve tried installing chrome on two machines, both with Symantec Endpoint Protection, and both failed with the same error.

  11. VIZCANO
    September 7th, 2008 at 18:20 | #11

    I have the same problem… and i have Symantec Endpoint Protection!!!…. Is there a Solution???!!!!

  12. Benhur
    September 11th, 2008 at 23:27 | #12

    I was unlucky enough to install Chrome at my desktop. After two days, Vista started to give weird dll errors (related to Chrome/Google updater).So I have re-installed my Vista last night till 2 oclock.

  13. john
    September 14th, 2008 at 13:43 | #13

    here is a fix

    1) Back up the registry on an affected system.
    2) Open the registry on the Agent system by entering regedit from a run prompt.
    3) Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SysPlant.
    4) Open the Start DWORD.
    5) Change the value to 4 to disable the drivers.
    6) Reboot the system to commit the changes

  14. September 21st, 2008 at 11:04 | #14

    Running Yahoo stattracker for Fantasy Football or CBS Sportsline running flash, Chrome freezes the whole machine for 2 minutes and then reports that the plugin has crashed. Separate processes my ass.

    On my office Dell D430 with 2 DUO Core and 2GB or RAM, Chrome causes SAV LiveUpdate to max the machine at 100% CPU until reinstalled.

  15. rene
    February 3rd, 2009 at 19:36 | #15

    Chrome has been working great on 3 machines, no Symantec products installed.

    A drive-by virus, SysGuard, installed, changed a number of registry entries including disabling images in IE7 and disabling access to regedit, now Chrome loads the Aw:Snap page with App failed to initialize error, unless I use the –no-sandbox option.

    I have version 1.0.154.148 on XP Pro SP3.

  16. jungleman
    March 9th, 2009 at 04:39 | #16

    I installed Chrome on a Windows XP SP2 (PT-BR). The app starts, but crashes whenever I try to load ANY webpage. It crashes throwing an error saying “ops, Chrome crashed!” or so. Uninstall/reinstall didn’t resolve the problem. I sent the bug repport to Google but, like you, I can’t find so much info about it (using FF, of course :P ) Hope Google fix it, because it seems a cool browser (I’m getting used to it on work). Cheers.

  17. Annoyed
    March 29th, 2009 at 11:47 | #17

    Well, I WAS using chrome. Started out great, then slowed to a snails pace. Was like using very bad dialup. So I decided to uninstall and reinstall. Every time I tried in initialize their download, it crashed my computer. So it looks like I will be returning to Firefox.
    Too bad, looked promising

  18. sambacasual
    April 27th, 2009 at 07:33 | #18

    been using chrome daily and withoiut hitch for about 3 months now and then i open it up today and get the “failed to initialize” message,i uninstalled and now if i click on a link to reinstall it crashes my system!

  19. September 20th, 2009 at 09:01 | #19

    i seem to have the same technol problem…i guess facebook and MSN are just full of potintial trogans,viruses, chrome is overloaded i guess

  20. June 4th, 2010 at 22:13 | #20

    here is one efficient solution to prevent google chrome from crashing.. click here

  1. September 4th, 2008 at 20:58 | #1