After Security Update 2021-007 for Catalina, Google Earth Pro isn't working anymore

See: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253309962?answerId=256251431022#256251431022

and: https://communities.apple.com/de/thread/253320172

Can you try Safe Mode (which disables all third party extensions)?

I have a 2013 Macbook Air with the Security Update applied and it works fine. But it has the HD5000 Intel graphics, not the HD4000. It was reported in another thread that the problems went away with the HD4000 in Safe Mode, which might indicate that a third party extension does not work with the MacOS when the Security Update is applied. But I don't know what happens with the Intel graphics driver in safe mode, whether it is enabled or not.

kestrel9532 wrote:

[...]

I read in another thread somewhere here that macOS Catalina meanwhile includes the Security Update 2021-007. If that's the case, then there's no way back anymore other than a TimeMachine-Backup if you have one :-(

I verified this as 'false'.

I did a reinstall of Catalina both from the local recovery partition of my Mac Mini Late 2012 (Boot with CMD + R pressed) as well as directly from the internet (Boot with CMD + ALT + R pressed). In both cases the installation of system updates is required afterwards, including 'Security Update 2021-007 Catalina'. So this is the point where 'Security Update 2021-006 Catalina' can be installed instead - without the faulty HD4000 driver. This was true for Nov. 27, 2021.

Admittedly this is not best practice :-) But if the need for a complete working GPU is really "mission critical", one has to decide between purchase of new(er) hardware to be able to fix the latest security issues on one hand and omitting the latest security fix to keep the machine running without restrictions on the graphics system on the other.

Sure, this is a workaround and I also would appreciate if Apple did NOT make this mistake with the faulty HD4000 fixes. But at least there IS a workaround available - better than not ;-). It has to be clear what has been done if the latest fix has not been installed: Better make your online banking with your iPhone from now on ;-) (You get the picture I hope).

Waiting for a fixed 'Security Update 2021-008 Catalina'...

Regards

Matthias

I have this problem too. Not only Google Earth Pro, but Stellarium, and RStudio all crashed. Not sure if it's this, but that all had Qt in the traceback (which did get sent to Apple). I didn't check all apps, but these are critical for me.

My solution was to roll back to my last Time Machine backup and all is fine. But now I'm in security limbo since I've had to turn off security updates.

So glad it's others too. A few days ago I went looking for people with similar problems and nothing!!

I have a 2012 Macbook Pro with 16GB RAM and a 1 TB SSD. Still works brilliantly - well up until now.

Kestrel -- in the other thread you described a clean install to an external drive where you applied the Security Update and then, with nothing other than Apple MacOS software, the system showed the errors. So I think that shows that the Security Update is not handling the HD4000 hardware properly. As I suggested in the other thread, I think you should submit a bug report to Apple. Maybe their support people already did that for you ...

No, the opposite is true: It seems they broke it :-}

If you look into the content of Security Update 2021-007 Catalina then you see that Apple (kind of) fixed two Issues with the Intel Graphics Driver. And I strongly assume that (at least) one of these two fixes is the root cause for the problems users have. In case they have a Mac with HD4000 graphics running current Catalina of course - only then.

That's the reason why I think that Apple should be made aware of these problems...

Regards - Matthias

A guy at mactechnews.de found a pretty simple solution for the "Safari/WebGL"-Problem:

In Safari check "Develop -> Experimental Features -> WebGL via Metal" to "on" - then WebGL-pages load again without problems (so far). Especially 'earth.google.com' works again :-)

Regards - Matthias

Excellent tip.

"WebGL via Metal -> on" fixes Google Earth and Street View in Google Maps.

Right question :-)

In Safe Mode the error does not occur. We found this during a session with Apple Support. But the graphics performance is extremely degraded then.

I'm absolutely no specialist for graphics hardware, but it feels like a very basic standard graphics driver uses an assumed standard graphics API like "VGA" in the IBM PC world. At least that works...

If Apple states that they fixed two security issues in the Intel HD4000 graphics driver then they obviously have the Intel sources and modified them or have modified their own driver and have the sources anyway. Then the 'third party extension' is in fact an Apple extension. :-)

Regards - Matthias

Yeah, I totally agree!

So far this is our top crash issue, though the # of users may not be majority, but the crash # contributes almost half of the total.

All users are using Intel HD4000 Graphics card.

Looking forward to the new update from Apple! :-)

This bug concerns not only Google Earth, but also RStudio, certain QGIS Plugins, a lot of Web Pages for User who prefer Firefox and Chrome, and so on.

Apple has to react and must support the hd 4000 graphics again. That's the point

kestrel9532, Security Update 2021-006 needs to be manually downloaded from https://support.apple.com/kb/DL2085?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US - it will not show up in Software Update now that 2021-007 is out. AFAIK, each manually downloaded update is cumulative so all you need to do is reinstall Catalina plus 2021-006 (that's what I did and all seems well - now if only I could tell MacOS to ignore 2021-007 so the badge on System Preferences would go away).

I fell back to 2021-006 about two weeks ago so if reinstall via Ctrl-R no longer gets you Catalina without 2021-007, it changed within the last two weeks.

I had exactly the same issue and had to restore my two macbook pros from time machine backups to prove that this latest security update (2021-7) was the culprit. Fortunately I only lost 5 hours working time, but feel that perhaps Apple should offer an update that does not break Google Earth.

I believe this is the same to us. And we also experience the crash issue with MAC OS Catalina 10.15.7 (19H1519), which contains the buggy graphics card driver for AppleIntelHD4000GraphicsGLDriver.

The update was released on Oct 25, and we started observing spiky crash for the issue. Searching shows that several other applications are also experiencing the same issue.

And we know the old graphics card HD 4000 is affected, and newer graphics card seems to be ok so far.

Please escalate this issue and release some patch as early as possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_Catalina

https://issueexplorer.com/issue/Ultimaker/Cura/10701

https://github.com/rstudio/rstudio/issues/10020