Operating Chrome on a Mac? Run This Repair Earlier than It Crashes
Google’s Chrome updater has been sending Macs into an limitless reboot loop, rendering all of them however ineffective till the problem is fastened. Although the issue was at first considered brought on by Avid’s Media Composer video-editing app working on older Mac Professional computer systems, additional investigation has proven that to not be the case.
An investigation by the Mac enterprise and IT weblog Mr. Macintosh has urged that the newest model of Google Keystone (Google Chrome’s updater) comes with a bug that deletes a symlink on the /var path on the Mac it runs on. What this implies in plain English is Google Keystone primarily deletes a key MacOS system file.
It was discovered that this concern solely impacts Macs the place System Integrity Safety (SIP) has been disabled. Usually, you must by no means disable SIP as it’s designed to guard towards exactly this kind of downside, however some customers might have to show it off for his or her work. It’s thought that for this reason the issue was initially linked to Media Composer, as some video editors could need to work with third-party graphics playing cards that SIP would possibly in any other case block.
SIP was launched with OS X El Capitan in 2015. Which means if you happen to’re working an older model of MacOS you might be affected if you happen to use Chrome in your machine. Should you assume you may be affected, you’ll be able to launch Terminal and run the “ls -ldO /var” command (with out the speech marks). You probably have not been affected, you’ll get the next output:
lrwxr-xr-x@ 1 root wheel restricted,hidden 11 Apr 1 2018 /var -> personal/var
If, nevertheless, your system has been affected, you’ll see this:
drwxr-xr-x 5 503 wheel – 170 Sep 24 14:37 /var
Should you see that, you need to not shut down or reboot your Mac or sign off of your account, as this can immediate the Mac to get caught within the repeating boot cycle.
For now, Google has disabled Keystone whereas it makes an attempt to resolve the problem. It has additionally mentioned that in case you have been affected, you must boot your Mac into restoration mode, launch Terminal and enter the next instructions:
chroot /Volumes/Macintosh HD
rm -rf /Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle
mv var var_back
ln -sh personal/var
chflags -h restricted /var
chflags -h hidden /var
xattr -sw com.apple.rootless “” /var
Observe: “Macintosh HD” is the default identify for a Mac’s boot drive. If yours is completely different, change “Macintosh” within the first command with the identify of your drive.
It’s best to then reboot your Mac. This can take away the affected model of Chrome’s updater, then restore it from the harm it induced within the first place.
Reinstalling MacOS can also be mentioned to work, though you must ensure that to not reformat your drives as this can delete any recordsdata in your pc; only a easy reinstall will do. And if you happen to’ve been having different issues with Google Chrome, we’ve obtained a raft of fixes for a few of its most typical points.
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