Lion is still very unstable, go back to Snow Leopard.

Lion is not the issue here. I have narrowed it down to being solely a Chrome issue as the crashes do not happen after hours of browsing on Firefox or Safari. I also tested out graphics intensive applications such as Cinebench several times with total stability. Opening Chrome and staring at a website as simple as google.com will cause a crash in under 2 minutes.

Deleting /Users/<user name>/Application Support/Google/Chrome Canary/Default folder seems to have fixed the issue as far as I can tell

Issue reappears after updating to 15.0.871.1 canary.

Is this still an issue for you ?

If yes, please go to chrome://crashes and post the report id here.

Thanks in advance.

This issue has resurfaced. It is extensively documented in a discussion thread on the apple support forums, with the first mention of Chrome appearing on the third page, here: https://discussions.apple.com/message/22465451#22465451

I am having this issue myself. When using Chrome on OS X 10.8.5 on a mid-2013 Macbook Air, the screen will occasionally go black with only the mouse appearing (still movable). From there I can sometimes let it idle to sleep and tap the mouse or keyboard to bring it back, other times it requires a full reboot. I also had this issue on 10.8.4, which came installed when I bought it, only on that version I don't recall ever having a mouse on the screen when it went to black.

this is definitely a chrome issue with osx.
please fix.

I'm still experiencing this! Get it fixed, please!!!

The current form of this problem is reproducible for me as follows. On a mid-2013 Macbook Air running OS X 10.8.5 with Chrome v30, launch Chrome. Close the device's lid so as to put it to sleep. Open it again, and you see a black screen with only the mouse visible. Wait around 30 seconds and the device goes back to sleep (normal behavior at lock screen). Press a mouse button or key to wake the device again and the lock screen appears and the device returns to normal. Repeat as desired.

This could be a driver issue unrelated to Chrome, but I only ever experience it with Chrome opened, and others report the same findings.

 abwic...@gmail.com ..
I had the exact same problem, after uninstalling chrome, the problem disappeared .. but i have a new problem now, i need to use safari :'(
fix this GOOGLE! And tell me when i can install chrome again please!

abwic, same pb here. I had not realized that it was related to Chrome...
I kind of remember that I also had this black screen while using my computer normally (even after a few minutes of use).

I have the same issue since a few days after updating to OS X Mavericks (10.9), and never experienced it with Lion (10.7). I thought it was unrelated to chrome at the beginning since the computer was crashing after logging in to the computer too, but I noticed chrome start after login. If i "force kill" chrome just after the login, no crash appear. Then when I run chrome anytime with a "saved session" (that re-open automatically after crash), it crash the computer again with a black screen.

I removed any non-official drivers (using "kextstat | grep -v apple" to list them), thinking only some kernel code could f*** up the screen this way: black screen but also  random color patterns (vertical grey or blue lines), and screen shifting (having 20% of the right part on the left, and i could see the mouse moving to the shifted part after going to the right border.

Anyway, this is definitely an Apple bug, but it seems closely related to Chrome since I don't experience this bug with firefox or the other apps I use. Maybe it is not related to chrome, but it really looks like it.

I have no possibility to go to "chrome://crashes" since the computer crash instantly after starting chrome. I disabled "hardware acceleration", but I might have enabled it again while writing some webgl code.
I can try to backup & remove the user profile located at "~/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome/Default" as noted in the #3 but I don't really want to loose my bookmarks and the installed extensions. I'll update this message with the report id if I am able to get any. Otherwise i'll just come back to firefox. But please...

Please fix this important bug.

Enter your Happening to me too.  I use Mac OS X 10.6.8, which has otherwise been an incredibly stable OS for me (and it doesn't look like "upgrading"--if you can even call it that anymore--will fix the problem), but Chromium will suddenly go to a black screen.  I find this the most when saving PDF files to my harddrive (whether I'd opened the PDF file in the browser *or not*) from a website server.  No warning, no other rhyme or reason.  Pisses me off.  Same here, no other option than to force a restart, losing everything I might've been working on up until then.  I've literally learned to save ALL my open files every 2 min or so, which I suspect may not be good for my system.  I'm going back to fucking Safari (Firefox is horrible at handling PDFs).  Sad to know that this is STILL a problem a year later.

Didn't observe any such rendering issue on the latest stable(41.0.2272.118) with Mac OS 10.9.5.

If anyone is still seeing this issue please update the thread with chrome version and Mac OS platform details. 

Happening to me too.

Macbook Pro 15 inch Retina, OSX 10.9.5; Chrome Version 45.0.2454.85 (64-bit)

After a few minutes of browsing mainly content rich websites with video and flash, the Mac screen goes black and the only way to recover is to restart.

PLEASE HELP.

Happens to me too.

If the laptop is asleep, I wake it up, login (Screen on), and Chrome happens to be the focused app, the screen is turned off. Pressing CMD+Q to exit Chrome without looking turns the screen on (while other combinations of keys don't do anything). Sometimes CMD+TAB to another app solves it too.

There are also random blank screens when using Chrome only. Switching app seems to fix it.

Chrome Version: 47.0.2503.0 dev (64-bit)
Mac OS Version: 10.10.5

(Note: I suspected before it's a bug in Mac OS X related to turning power naps on, but it didn't help, AND, as I mentioned, it happens only with Chrome, and quitting Chrome or switching to different app in fullscreen mode fixes it, so it seems Chrome issue)

+ccameron, shrike

Any ideas why Chrome might cause the screen to go black? 

No ideas offhand. This has been reported since Chrome 15, and all of the rendering related stuff has gone through several generations since then.

If anyone can come up with a reproduction, we'd love to try it out. (Steps from #17 don't work for me). 

I have experienced the "black screen with only cursor active" state before but it has been after a wake from sleep, and never did I first see the normal screen.

The fact that the cursor is still visible is significant. I suspect that it's blitted to the screen using a system that's separate from whatever builds the rest of the screen image, which to me implies that something in that rendering path is choking (window server, OpenGL, hardware). It would be interesting to check the Console logs for clues after recovering from this state.

Unable to repro this issue on MAC (10.11.3) Retina & Non-Retina Displays for Google Chrome Stable Version - 49.0.2623.75 & Google Chrome Canary Version - 51.0.2669.0

@sims5677: Could you please update your Google Chrome to Latest Stable & Canary Versions and let us know your observations.

Thank you.

@shrike/ccameron: Can we go ahead and close this issue as per the comment #22.

Since we are not able to repro this issue on MAC (10.11.3) Non-Retina & MAC (10.11.5) Retina displays for Google Chrome Canary Version - 51.0.2692.0

Thank you.