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Crash Chrome With 16 Characters

Posted by timothy on from the you-go-first dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Remember when it took just eight characters to crash Skype? Apparently it takes double that to take out Chrome: Typing in a 16-character link and hitting enter, clicking on a 16-character link, or even just putting your cursor over a 16-character link, will crash Google's browser. To try it yourself, fire up Chrome 45 (the latest stable version) or older and put this into your address bar: http: //a/%%30%30 (without the space).

2 of 205 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It's not just Chrome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Further, I think this is probably some weird interaction between separate components that causes the crash, which is really hard to unit test. It's not an error in the URL parser per se. I stuck this into a URL shortener and Chrome redirects to the funky address just fine. It does not load the page, but it doesn't crash either. On the other hand, if you do anything that triggers the actual rendering of the URL on the screen, it crashes. So the bug must be somewhere in the interface between the URL parser and the rendering engine.

  2. Re:It's not just Chrome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I just typed in numerous 16 character URLs, such as http://bbc.co.uk/ into that version of Chrome and it worked just fine. What you probably mean is typing in a URL made up of escape sequences that don't make a valid url.