It turns out that Chrome has a little issue. There is a bug in Chrome’s browser which causes it to crash when clicking on or just even mousing over a certain 16 character text string placed on a web page.
The phrase “http://a/%%30%30” ,off course without the quotes, when it’s a link, or putting the string into the URL bar and then pressing Enter, will cause the current tab to crash or worse the whole browser its self, taking any and all work currently in progress with it.
This is how it started. The bug was discovered by Andris Atteka who is a security researcher from Latvia. He reported this matter to Google on 18 September. This is how this works. Placing null characters like %%30%30 or something similar at the end of the URL will cause Chrome to choke as it tries to rationalise the web address.
The current version of Chrome ion windows and OS X is affected by the bug but Chrome on Android devices are not effected in the Guardian’s testing. Instead it just failed to load the URL. Android web view seems to be affected due to several reports. Android web view is the version of Chrome that operates as part of Android to provide third party apps like Twitter, Facebook and others with an integrated web browser.
The issue has been fixed in the latest revision of the open-source base for Google’s Chrome today by Chromium developers. The fix will take time to move through the developer and beta builds to the most popular “stable” version of Chrome.
Good thing Chrome can recover lost tabs upon restarting but any work or text entered into boxes or forms etc, will most likely not be saved.
