This morning Google Chrome, my default browser, isn’t working, It launches with a popup asking whether I want to restore pages. But it won’t respond to either choice or anything else. After a few seconds it crashes.
I tried deleting it and reinstalling it from the Chrome website, but it’s still doing the same thing. I restarted the Mac before installing the new copy of Chrome. It’s version 131.0.6778.205…
Safari and Firefox work fine, but because I’ve been using Chrome most of the time it has a lot of valuable bookmarks in it that aren’t in the other browsers.
If you are indeed looking for help (not asking if people think you need help or if help exists), I would first try creating another user account on your iMac and see if Chrome launches. If it does, there is some problem in your existing macOS user account or in your specific user setup in Chrome. If not, there is a system-wide problem. Knowing where the problem lies will help with troubleshooting.
(I am on a 2017 iMac, Ventura 13.7.2 and the same version of Chrome is running without any problems on my system).
First, I suggest importing your Chrome bookmarks into one of the non-Chrome browsers you use to ensure your “valuable bookmarks” are preserved outside of Chrome (Firefox: Firefox/Settings/General/Import Browser Data ; Safari: File/Import from Browser/Google Chrome.app ). Or download and install a new browser to import and hold the bookmarks.
Then, one troubleshooting action you can try (note that if you want to to follow best practices, you should backup your computer and disconnect the drive that holds your backups before making any changes) is to go to Macintosh HD/Users/[your login name]/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default . Drag the Default folder to the Desktop. Rename it (for example, Default_Test ). Now drag the folder to the Trash. DO NOT EMPTY THE TRASH! Now launch Chrome. This may get Chrome to rebuild the Default folder, as if Chrome is being run for the first time, and give you a fresh start.
If that works, use Chrome for a couple of days to ensure everything behaves as you are used to. You can either restore your bookmarks from one of your other browsers or from the Bookmarks file in the renamed Default folder. You can delete the renamed Default folder when you feel confident you don’t need it anymore.
If the above steps don’t work, move the renamed Default folder back to the Desktop, delete the new Default folder, change the renamed Default folder’s name back to Default and put it back in the Chrome folder. Then you can either continue to try to troubleshoot (a good source for info that uses artificial intelligence to generate answers is Perplexity.ai ) or consider abandoning Chrome. Firefox and Safari are fine browsers, as is DuckDuckGo .
If you point your browser at chrome://version, you’ll see all kinds of metadata, including a Profile path, which will be the location of your Chrome profile data. If your profile was created from an old installation of Chrome, it is possible that your installation is storing the files in a different location from the current version.
Also, this URL will work for other Chromium-based browsers (e.g. Chromium or Microsoft Edge, which redirects to edge://version):
Thanks. Apple support walked me through this while screen sharing, trying various approaches for over an hour. No luck. I’ve abandoned Chrome.I have a text file where I keep all my login info, so the loss of the bookmarks is more a nuisance than anything.
If you are keeping user names and passwords (I understand “bookmarks” to mean stored web site addresses, not login info) in a text file, I recommend thinking about either transferring them to a password manager or encrypting the text file. This is for security, especially if you are storing account information for financial, health, or governmental websites.
If you do need a password manager, Apple began including a Password app in macOS recently. A popular non-Apple password manager with TidBITS users is 1Password .
I am truly surprised. If a new login on your Mac worked, then you should be able to just blow away your Chrome profile and create a new one. I suppose, however, that the problem data might be in your Google account, causing the bug to reappear after syncing with it. (You didn’t say if your new-account test sync’ed with your Google account or not).
I’d love to know the cause of the problem, but I understand completely if you’ve tried everything you can think of and are going to switch to something else.
Likewise. I keep my master copy in a text file (which I don’t sync to anything else, for security reasons). I also use Firefox’s built-in password manager (which syncs to my other Firefox installations via my Mozilla account) and Safari’s password manager (which syncs to my other iDevices via iCloud), so my browsers can (usually) auto-fill my login credentials.
For bookmarks, I do use the Bookmark features of Firefox and Safari (which sync via their respective cloud mechanisms), but my primary bookmark list is an HTML file that I hand-edit and serve from a web server on my LAN. I use this file as my home page for all my browsers, so I just see the links whenever I launch the browser.
I restarted my iMac from a different login that I use for test purposes, and Chrome worked fine. That’s when the support guy helped me delete any files that might be causing the problem, but that didn’t work. Had me reinstall the operating system. That didn’t work either,
