Visiting this URL will crash Chrome

Browser stability is a big issue, and it's something that can very easily sway choices. A bug has been discovered in Chrome which crashes the browser if a user visits a particular URL -- 16 characters is all it takes to kill Google's web browser.

The problem is reported as affecting Chrome 45 and older, although it also seems to all kill version 47 on the Dev channel. The issue stems from the inclusion of a NULL character in the URL and has already been reported to Google.

To see if your browser is affected, you just need to type http ://a/%%30%30 into the address bar, remove the space after the p, and hit Enter. Make sure you're not in the middle of anything important in any of the other tabs you have open as the resulting crash will interfere with things. If you're wondering why we didn’t just link to the problematic URL, it's because simply hovering over the link can lead to a crash too.

The bug was discovered by Andris Atteka, and the reason for what is happening is explained as:

It seems to be crashing in some very old code. In the Debug build, it's hitting a DCHECK on an invalid URL in GURL, deep in some History code.

Although Google runs a bug bounty program, the company is not paying out in this instance because it is not seen as a security problem -- although it is certainly an issue that is slightly irritating and open to exploitation.