November 13, 2014

Chrome 38 / Chromium keeps crashing in Ubuntu 14.10 (or the Ooops syndrome)

tl;dr
Start chrome with "--disable-gpu-sandbox flag".

Since I moved to Ubuntu 14.10; I experienced frequent crashes of latest chrome release. Had the same issue in chromium. The problem only occurred on some pages, but couldn't detect root cause.

After digging, found this thread.
Issue seems to be pre 14.04, then fixed in 14.04, and back again in 14.10.

So the problem is hardware acceleration related (no need to say waaaaay beyond my knowledge). You can check hadware and WebGL usage of your browser with the about://gpu URL. If everything's fine, all lights should be green (hardware acceleration must of course be enabled in chrome://settings).

So - as stated in the thread linked above, starting the browser with the "--disable-gpu-sandbox" flag I'm not having the issue anymore. I don't know if this raises some security concerns as some will say, but for now it's been working nice for a couple of hours.

To alter the unity shortcut to add this option wasn't that simple :
- editing the  ~/.local/share/applications/[your chrome app].desktop shortcut didn't work, I don' know why
- alacarte software, which usually works really well to create/edit launchers didn't allow me to edit the chrome launcher (this seems to be a known bug though)
- finally I found the "MenuLibre" software, equivalent to "Alacarte", but...working for chrome entry. Here is the installation package

Hope this help.

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