Google Chrome will prevent some Macs from sleeping.

Question

Level 1

1 points

Google Chrome will prevent some Macs from sleeping.

I came here last night and searched for help because my MacBook wouldn't sleep even when I closed the lid. I tried all of the remedies suggested; I zapped the PRam, reset the SMC, repaired disk permissions, tried to manually make the macBook sleep, etc. Nothing worked.

Through trial and error and many many many restarts, I mostly by accident figured out that Google Chrome was preventing my MacBook from sleeping. Even when Chrome appeared to be closed it was doing something in the background. After I deleted Google Chrome and went back to Firefox, everything worked fine. I then checked my iMac and discovered Google Chrome was also preventing it from sleep. Again, I got rid of Chrome and downloaded a new version of Firefox. Safari works fine too.

I then went to dogpile (no more google for me) and searched with keywords something like, "Google chrome preventing mac from sleeping" and got lots of hits because apparently this has happened to a lot of other people besides me. There doesn't seem to be anything here about it so I wanted to post something here for future reference if someone is having similar problems.

My son's MacBook is running Google Chrome just fine without any sleep issues so it clearly only affects some Mac computers.

So if you are using Google Chrome and notice sleep problems, you should try zapping Google Chrome and use Safari or Firefox or some other browser.

Karen

iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.2)

Posted on Nov 29, 2011 7:01 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

robin051

Level 1

24 points

Jul 28, 2012 5:33 AM in response to krabitha

Just for your information, if you want to find out what applications or processes are preventing your Mac from going to sleep, do the following steps.

Go to "Terminal",

Type "pmset -g assertions

If "PreventUserIdleSystemSleep" is 1, then look further down "Listed by owning process:". It will tell you what applications are preventing your system going into sleep. Knowing the PID, then you can just go to "Activity Monitor" and find out what it is.

One more thing, it turns out that it's not Chrome itself which prevents the system going into sleep. It most probably is due to plugin(s).

Cheers,

Robin.

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Answer 2

binhwpo

Level 1

9 points

Oct 10, 2014 10:25 PM in response to robin051

Thanks for this robin051, I tried your steps and it turned out that:

PreventUserIdleSystemSleep 1

pid 25218(Google Chrome): [0x00000001000022f7] 00:00:08 NoIdleSleepAssertion named: "WebRTC has active PeerConnections."

The culprit is "Awesome Screenshot: Capture & Annotate" as disabling it will take the problem away.

Cheers,
Binh

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Answer 3

laket06

Level 1

0 points

Jan 12, 2015 6:05 AM in response to binhwpo

Anyone else who has this problem should notify the developer of Awesome Screenshot via the Chrome Web Store (where you downloaded the extension). This damaged the GPU on my MacBook Pro after almost a year of it not being able to sleep & being kept in my bag after work, overheating without me knowing it. I never thought too much about it, eventually I just figured it was no big deal because I have an SSD. Now I get blue, pink, purple, green, etc. screens of death. It's all part of my memoir "Unfortunate Screens"...

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Answer 4

Feb 5, 2015 9:33 AM in response to krabitha

Just wanted to note that this was happening to me as well. I don't think it was a problem in the past (and though my MBP's GPU died, I think that was due to it being one of the 2011s with the thermal paste issue), as I only today noticed my MBA lost 11% battery in two hours while closed.

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