Chrome for Mac no longer crashes when loading strings that can’t be named

Users of Google Chrome for Mac are no longer vulnerable to strings of foreign-language characters that for more than six weeks triggered crashes each time the browser attempted to render them.

The forbidden three-character string was reported in February on Google's official Chromium developer site. To prevent her Mac-based version of Chrome from crashing before the bug report could be posted, the author uploaded the enigmatic string here. Sure enough, when opened with most versions of Chrome for OS X, the characters caused the tab to crash and display the familiar "Aw, Snap!" error message.

Late last week, reports of the denial-of-service string that must not be named emerged again. When viewed in TweetDeck and Apple's Safari browser, the string appeared as a series of rectangles that had no visible effect on the functioning of the applications. But when rendered in Chrome for Mac, the string immediately triggered the crash and error message.

"This is pretty serious," the person filing the second report wrote. "You could imagine someone spamming this message in hangouts/gmail and just straight-up force crashing all Mac Chrome browsers. Someone could post this on Facebook and force-crash all Mac Chrome browsers that saw it."

In a world where all major browsers are vulnerable to an endless buffet of remotely triggered malware attacks, it's an overstatement to call this comparatively innocuous denial-of-service bug "serious." Still, the author had a point. Flaws that can trigger mass crashes are at the very least problematic, and depending on how they're exploited, they could cause bigger problems in edge cases. In fairness to Chrome developers, similar DoS bugs have bitten a raft of OS X and iOS apps in the past.

Fortunately, the bug has been fixed in the recently released Chrome 41.0.2272.104. That version for Macs will display the forbidden string as rectangles rather than as the foreign-language string displayed in Windows versions. It's still not entirely clear what caused the bug, but several people have reported that the strings won't trigger crashes on unpatched OS X Chrome versions that installed a Syriac font or a Thaana font.

Ars isn't printing the characters to prevent crashes on Macs that have not yet installed a fix.