Google Chrome Freezing — A Temporary Fix
Well, Google Chrome has impressed me enough to make it my default browser already — though normally there will be Firefox windows open as well, at least while Chrome is in its current state of development.
If you use Chrome regularly, you may have had it pause or freeze on you… especially when a tab utilizes a plugin such as Adobe Flash or Adobe Acrobat. IT enthusiast and expert Alex Wells has discovered, and it is verified to work on my setup as well, an easy method that seems to unfreeze Chrome in most cases:
When Chrome freezes, simply right-click on the Chrome icon in the Windows taskbar. Note that if you have the “Group similar taskbar buttons” option enabled (it’s enabled by default), then you must first left-click to expand the group before right-clicking.
As far as we have seen, this method has (oddly) cured the freezes in Chrome. Keeping that in mind, hopefully an update will be released that addresses the freezing issue. Since the right-clicking method seems to work, maybe it will be a pretty easy patch!
October 2nd, 2008 at 4:21 pm
Thanks for the suggestion. Look forward to testing it out… once Google freeze again (which it seems to do Flash apps). Cheers.
October 7th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
No problem! We’d be curious to know the results…
October 8th, 2008 at 9:59 am
Whoa.. it worked.. i was on youtube when google chrome froze up. i went to my taskbar and right clicked.. but maybe it was coincidence?
also, mind investigating spell check? it doesn’t seem to work on all ‘text areas’.. or is it just me?
October 8th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
As far as I’ve seen, the spell checking works on all textareas, but is not triggered in textboxes:
Textbox vs textarea: http://www.htmlite.com/lite023.php
In Firefox it is possible to manually enable it for a textbox, but that does not appear to be the case in Chrome, at least currently.
October 9th, 2008 at 12:44 am
Oh thanks! I had no idea. I learned something today~
October 9th, 2008 at 1:04 am
hehe :p
October 9th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
Wow, that actually worked — how bizarre!
October 14th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
Thanks for the fix, it works fine. Unfortunately acrobat freezes so much with chrome that I have to click it several times every minute to unfreeze it.
annoying.
October 14th, 2008 at 11:45 pm
Ah yes, thank you for mentioning that sometimes it requires more than one right-click… indeed it is frustrating :-/ hopefully they will make a fix for it soon. The same Alex mentioned in this post brought up an interesting point — maybe the prominence of the “task manager” in Chrome is guising an effort to “call Adobe out” on their bloatware :-p
December 12th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Acrobat freezes min up constantly - that is terrible - I guess it is in beta still - jeeeze.
December 12th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Yeah, Acrobat seems to freeze everything up constantly….. hopefully they’ll fix the freezing issue soon… it has so much promise of being a really awesome browser, and it’s good enough already (to me at least) to be a default browser… we just need some kind of plugin/extension system!
May 29th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
ahhh… it seems to work for everybody but not for me. =( Thanks though.
June 9th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Man, I always try the right-click when it freezes but it doesn’t work at all.. It just freezes and a msg comes up saying “google chrome just froze, would you like to wait?”
June 23rd, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Unfortunately, this process doesn’t resolve the issue for me. So far, I have found a mere handful of sites that I can actually access without a problem. The rest freeze and though I can switch from tab to tab like nothing’s wrong and without lag, I can not interact with any of the pages. This includes the inability to scroll. It is as though the entire program is “not responding”. Yet, it is because I can, as I said, switch between tabs. When looking at my processes list in task manager, the CPU sits at a nice 5-6% and Chrome uses hardly any RAM. So I know it’s not a resource issue.
I installed it on my girlfriend’s computer and it works beautifully on there. She is using Vista, whereas I am using Win XP x64. I don’t think that’s the problem, but I am not ruling it out.
Does anyone else have any other resolutions that has worked for them. I’m not sure why it would be doing this and can not pinpoint any clue as to the reason.
June 23rd, 2009 at 6:05 pm
NOTE:
Forgot to add:
I also get the message that asks if I want to wait or kill pages. If I click Wait, a little while later, same result. If I click Kill Pages, nothing happens.
June 23rd, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Interesting revelation:
Ok… so I downloaded the Google Chrome Channel Changer and switched to DEV mode (which is equivalent to alpha testing), and everything works AOK so far. Went to YouTUbe and put the browser through the tests, went to joecartoon and then to strongbad just for the various flash tests, downloaded some PDFs, everything seems to be pretty smooth so far.
July 12th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
Our Techjocks (Ask a computer question and get a free detailed answer 24/7/365) (this is what we call our highly techie writers and researchers) would be happy to write a detailed article on how to address freezing issues in Google Chrome. This is my default browser as well- Works extremely fast, Even faster than firefox perhaps!