Google Chrome hanging on startup

By Martin Brinkmann on September 19, 2012 - TAGS: None

For the past two days I have been noticing a issue with Google’s Chrome browser. Whenever I would start the browser, it would hang for a couple of seconds before the tabs of the previous session were loaded. This happened even if I had only one tab open that needed to be restored, so that I was pretty certain it was not caused by tab overload. I also tried switching to load the new tab page only on start up of the browser, which also did not resolve the issue. I’m experiencing hangs not only in Chrome Dev but also in Chrome Canary, which are both installed on a Windows 7 64-bit pro system.

• I have disabled all plugins and extensions to see if the issue was caused by addons but that was not the case either.
• I then tried to launch the browser in Incognito Mode and that too hung on startup for 5-10 seconds before the browser became responsive.
• Next try, a new profile. Starting Chrome with the parameter –user-data-dir=/tmp/test_profile_dir did not resolve the hanging on startup either.

• Clearing the complete browsing history did not have an effect either.
• Verified that known Chrome hang and crash issues where not causing the freezes on startup
• A restart of the PC did not resolve the issue either.

I grew pretty desperate at this point, and decided to uninstall Google Chrome on the PC to start with a clean installation of the browser afterwards in hope that this would resolve the freezes that I was experiencing. I first uninstalled Chrome Dev from my Windows system and all of the data it contained and restarted the computer afterwards. Once I did that I downloaded the installer from Softpedia, ran it, and started Chrome.

Guess what, the browser started without hangs or freezes. To make sure that this was not just a one time thing or so, I decided to open a few tabs before restarting it to see if that was the case. Well, Chrome is starting up fast and without issues now, even after restarts of the PC and some heavy use.

Keep in mind that you may lose data if you uninstall Chrome this way. If you do not want that to happen, configure Chrome to sync settings with a Google Account. This may however have the consequence that the cause for the problem is synced with your new Chrome installation so that you are experiencing it again.

Have you experienced issues with Chrome before in this regard? How did you resolve them?