A string of 13 characters is all it takes to bring down any tab in Chrome for OS X. As reported by VentureBeat and Gizmodo, the text has no impact if you're on Windows, Android, or iOS. But open any page or tab with the string on a Mac, and Chrome will crumble — or at least your current tab will. A bug report has already been filed with the Chromium project, so Google is likely aware of the pesky issue. It's possible to tweet out the text in question, and when that happens, it'll crash an open Twitter tab once it loads in your timeline. The bug report is about as straightforward as these things get; there's something to be said for brevity.

What steps will reproduce the problem?

1. Any page with REDACTED will crash the chrome tab on a Mac

2. Just create any dummy page with the unicode characters, and the Mac Chrome tab will crash hard

What is the expected result?

Expect it not to crash

What happens instead?

It crashes

VentureBeat notes that this doesn't happen every time, and our own tests seem to bear that out. One Verge staffer didn't experience any tab crash when loading the character string, so apparently Chrome doesn't load text the same way in every single instance. But if you see an annoying boost in failed Chrome tabs this weekend, well, now you've got one possible explanation — until Google gets around to fixing it. And no, we're not including the offending text here, but you can find it at the source links below.