Problem may also involve Flash, reported to Apple

A member of the Apple Support forums posted yesterday that an employee of the company had told him that "the specific combination" of Google's Chrome browser, it's built-in version of Flash and the Intel HD 4000 chip found in the latest MacBook Airs was causing a problem that Apple was working to fix, with some owners reporting frequent crashes and even kernel panics as a result of the issue.

Later Thursday, Google issued a statement admitting responsibility for the problem, blaming the issue on a "graphics resource leak" in the Chrome brower, and would issue an automatic update temporarily disabling some GPU acceleration features in Chrome. Google said its engineers would "find and fix" the cause, but that the problem was also being reported to Apple since "it should not be possible for an application to trigger such behavior."

The statement from Google, which first appeared on Gizmodo, added that the company expected to further issue patches to re-enable the graphic acceleration once the problem had been identified and isolated. Apple has not issued a formal comment on the matter. The problem will not affect Google's launch yesterday of the Chrome browser for iOS.

by MacNN Staff