Fix Chrome won’t open or launch on Windows 10 PC

If you are stuck because Google Chrome browser won’t open or launch or load web pages, then the chances are that either the Chrome files have been corrupted or some plugin is taking up a lot of resources. It may end up with a message – Google Chrome has stopped working. Surprisingly, you may also see it in the Task Manager, but there will nothing on the Taskbar. In this post, we will show how to fix this issue.

Chrome won’t open

If Google Chrome browser does not launch or start, here some ways to resolve the issue:

1. Kill Chrome from Task Manager
2. Check if your Antivirus is blocking Chrome
3. Delete User Profile in Chrome
4. Run Chrome in Safe Mode
5. Run Chrome Cleanup Tool
6. Reset or Reinstall Chrome.

1] Kill Chrome from Task Manager

If Chrome won’t open, maybe its process is running the background, but you do not see the browser windows. In this case, you will have to force quit Chrome and try launching again.

• Right-click on the Taskbar and select Task Manager. If the Task Manager is not responding, you can use Alt + Ctrl + Del and then select Task Manager.
• Under “Processes,” look for “Google Chrome” or “chrome.exe.”
• Right-click and select End process.
• Try relaunching the program.

2] Check if your Antivirus is blocking Chrome

Sometimes, because of false-positive, a security program might block Chrome, and this is why its not able to launch properly. You can either disable such software or completely uninstall them to see if Chrome can open.

3] Delete User Profile in Chrome

Open Run Prompt and type the following:

Look for folder name ‘Default folder’

Copy it to another drive as a backup, and then delete this folder.

Launch Chrome Again, and go to Settings > Advanced > Reset

You may have to sign in again with your Google account. All your data will be lost.

4] Run Chrome in Safe Mode

See if you can launch Chrome in Safe Mode. This will disable Chrome Extensions. This is just to check if any of the installed extensions are creating problems. If it launches, then you will have to manually find out the culprit and uninstall that extension.

5] Run Chrome Cleanup Tool

Since your browser does not open, you will have to try and run Chrome in Safe Mode. So if you can launch Chrome in Safe Mode, type the following and hit Enter:

This will run Chrome browser’s built-in Chrome’s Malware Scanner & Cleanup Tool. It helps you remove unwanted ads, pop-ups & malware, Unusual Startup pages, toolbar, and anything else that spoils the experience by crashing websites by overloading the pages with memory requests.

6] Reset or Reinstall Chrome

You can reset the Chrome browser or reinstall Chrome again. Make sure to delete the user profile and other files located at:

Run CCleaner, and then fresh-install it.

We hope one of these solutions helps you to your problem on your Windows PC. This post will help you if Chrome crashes or freezes.

Date: September 12, 2018 Tags: Chrome

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Ashish is a veteran Windows, and Xbox user who excels in writing tips, tricks, and features on it to improve your day to day experience with your devices.

Windows 10 bug crashes your PC when you access this location

Lawrence Abrams

A bug in Windows 10 causes the operating system to crash with a Blue Screen of Death simply by opening a certain path in a browser’s address bar or using other Windows commands.

Last week, BleepingComputer learned of two bugs disclosed on Twitter by a Windows security researcher that can be abused by attackers in various attacks.

The first bug allows an unprivileged user or program to enter a single command that causes an NTFS volume to become marked as corrupted. While chkdsk resolved this issue in many tests, one of our tests showed that the command caused corruption on a hard drive that prevented Windows from starting.

Today, we look at the second bug that causes Windows 10 to perform a BSOD crash by merely attempting to open an unusual path.

Opening this path causes a BSOD

A Windows 10 bug first discovered by security researcher Walied Assar, and later publicly disclosed by security researcher Jonas Lykkegaard, causes Windows 10 to crash and display a BSOD when a special path is entered into the Chrome address bar.

When developers want to interact with Windows devices directly, they can pass a Win32 device namespace path as an argument to various Windows programming functions. For example, this allows an application to interact directly with a physical disk without going through the file system.

Lykkegaard told BleepingComputer that he discovered the following Win32 device namespace path for the ‘console multiplexer driver’ that he believes is used for ‘kernel / usermode ipc.’ When opening the path in various ways, even from low-privileged users, it would cause Windows 10 to crash.

When connecting to this device, developers are expected to pass along the ‘attach’ extended attribute to communicate with the device properly.

Lykkegaard discovered if you try to connect to the path without passing the attribute due to improper error checking, it will cause an exception that causes a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) crash in Windows 10.

Even worse, low privileged Windows users can attempt to connect to the device using this path, making it easy for any program executed on a computer to crash Windows 10.

In our tests, we have confirmed this bug to be present on Windows 10 version 1709 and later. BleepingComputer was unable to test it in earlier versions.

BleepingComputer reached out to Microsoft last week to learn if they knew of the bug already and if they would fix the bug.

“Microsoft has a customer commitment to investigate reported security issues and we will provide updates for impacted devices as soon as possible,” a Microsoft spokesperson told BleepingComputer.

Threat actors can abuse the bug

While it has not been determined if this bug could be exploited for remote code execution or elevation privilege, in its current form, it can be used as a denial of service attack on a computer.

Lykkegaard shared with BleepingComputer a Windows URL file (.url) with a setting pointing to \\.\globalroot\device\condrv\kernelconnect. When the file is downloaded, Windows 10 would try to render the URL file’s icon from the problematic path and automatically crash Windows 10.

BleepingComputer has since found numerous other ways to exploit this bug, including methods to cause BSODs automatically on Windows login.

In a real-life scenario, this bug could be abused by threat actors who have access to a network and want to cover their trail during an attack.

If they have admin credentials, they could remotely execute a command that accesses this path on all of the Windows 10 devices on a network to cause them to crash. The havoc caused on the network could delay investigations or prevent administrative controls from detecting an attack on a particular computer.

In 2017, a similar attack scenario was used by threat actors during a bank heist on the Far Eastern International Bank (FEIB) in Taiwan. In that attack, the threat actors deployed the Hermes ransomware on the network to delay investigations into the attack.

Update 2/8/21: Added Walied Assar as the original discoverer of this vulnerability.

What is default location of ChromeDriver and for installing Chrome on Windows

I need to install chromedriver on Windows OS. In the article below they specify:

«. ChromeDriver expects you to have Chrome installed in the default location for your platform. «

But I’m not sure what is the default location ?

On Mac OS it’s /usr/local/bin .

With this I don’t have to specify path explicitly or setup system path either.

How to achieve the same on Windows OS?

5 Answers 5

For any driver that Selenium must use to open the browser ( chromedriver , geckodriver , etc), you don’t have to worry about where it is installed, as long as it’s set in the PATH variable.

If you have it set in the OS PATH variable, you must be able to run it from the command or cmd (it’s always good to make sure it’s working).

Here’s how you can set it (append to the existing value):

Then you can just instantiate it as follows:

Hope it’s somehow helpful.

These are two interrelated important questions as follows :

• Default location of ChromeDriver
• Default location of Chromium/Google Chrome

ChromeDriver

You can download the recently released ChromeDriver from ChromeDriver — WebDriver for Chrome page and place it any where within your system. When you initialize the ChromeDriver you need to pass the absolute path of the ChromeDriver binary.

Additionally, you can also help WebDriver to locate the downloaded ChromeDriver executable through the following steps :

• Include the ChromeDriver location in your system PATH environment variable.
• (Java) Specify the location of ChromeDriver through the webdriver.chrome.driver system property
• (Python) Specify the location of ChromeDriver when instantiating webdriver.Chrome()

Chromium/Google Chrome

The most important fact is you need to ensure that Chromium/Google Chrome is installed in a recognized location as per the ChromeDriver — Requirements as the server expects you to have Chromium/Google Chrome installed in the default location for each system as per the snapshot:

Note : For Linux systems, the ChromeDriver expects /usr/bin/google-chrome to be a symlink to the actual Chrome binary. You can also override the Chrome binary location following Using a Chrome executable in a non-standard location .

How to completely Uninstall & Re-Install Google Chrome

Last updated on February 15th, 2017

Google Chrome is a very popular Internet browser, but some times it runs into problems that make it unstable. In such cases, the only solution is to completely remove and re-install Chrome from scratch. This tutorial will show you how to remove Google Chrome completely from your computer and to re-install your favorite browser again.

This tutorial can fix many Chrome problems and issues, like:

• Google Chrome doesn’t open at all.
• Google Chrome runs into crashes or slow performance.
• Google Chrome displays a «Your preferences could not be read» error message at startup.
• Ads constantly appearing on Google Chrome after adware infection.

How to completely remove Google Chrome in Windows. (All Versions)

Important: Keep in mind that if you follow this procedure, then you lose all your personal profile information stored on Google Chrome, including Bookmarks, Passwords, Settings, etc. Follow this procedure at your own responsibility if any of the other solutions didn’t have any effect.

Suggestions before you continue to remove Chrome from your computer:

1. Delete your current Chrome profile, and see if this helps to resolve Chrome’s problems. Instructions on how to remove the stored Chrome profile can be found in this article.
2. Backup your bookmarks.

Step 1: Uninstall Google Chrome from your computer.

1. Navigate to Windows Control Panel & open Programs & Features (Add/Remove Programs if you have Windows XP). In case you don’t know how to do that, here is what you have to do:

1. Press “Windows” + “R” keys to load the Run dialog box.
2. Type “appwiz.cpl” and press Enter.

2. In the program list, select the Google Chrome and click Uninstall.

Step 2: Enable the Hidden Files View.

You must enable the hidden files view before performing the next step. To do that go to:

1. Start >Control Panel >Folder Options. (In Windows 10 look for «File Explorer Options»)
2. Click the View tab.
3. Click (check) the Show hidden files, folders, and drives option &
4. Uncheck the Hide protected operating system files option.
5. Press OK.

• How to Enable Hidden files View in Windows 7
• How to Enable Hidden files View in Windows 8

Step 3: Delete “Chrome” folders from your computer.

Navigate to the following locations and delete (or rename) the “Chrome” folder(s) that exist there.

Windows 8,7, Vista:

• C:\Users\ \AppData\Local\Google\Chrome
• C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome

Windows XP:

• C:\Documents and Settings\ \Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome
• C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome

How to re-install Google Chrome.

Method 1. Using Chrome Download Center.

1. From any other browser that works (e.g. Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, etc.) navigate to https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/desktop/

2. Click Download Chrome and then follow the on screen instructions to finish the installation.

Method 2. Install a fresh copy of Google Chrome for all user accounts on your computer.

1. From any other browser that works (e.g. Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, etc.) , download and run the Alternate (offline) Google Chrome installer for all user accounts.

2. When the installation is completed, run Google Chrome.