When I clink on links in Mail, opens blank Chrome page

Mac Tech Support just had me do this, which worked like a charm: shut down the Mac. Get ready to press command, option, R, and P at once. Click the power button and immediately hold all four of those keys down together for 15 seconds (or, if earlier, until you hear the second start-up sound). Then log back in, and your email hyperlinks should work again.

I'm sure this has been resolved, but here's what I did.

1. Click on the 3 dots in upper right corner of the Chrome browser
2. Go down to Help, click on About Google Chrome
3. Under About Google Chrome click on Reload (I think that's what it was called, it is not there anymore on mine)
4. It closes the browser then reopens it up with all the pages that were there when it shut down.
5. Try to open a link from an email. It worked for me.

I can reproduce this behavior, switching back and forth between Safari and Chrome as the default browser.

Set default to Safari and links open fine in a browser window.

Switch to Chrome and links open a new blank browser window.

Switch back to Safari as default and links work fine.

Called Apple tech support and the answer was "it's Google's problem". When I explained that I've tested this on 2 Macs and the behavior does not occur before the upgrade to High Sierra, the response was "it's Google's problem".

I'll escalate. But, Apple needs to take note that "it just works" is no longer as much of a valid slogan.

We should not be forced to use Safari for all web browsing.

skater953 wrote:

All I had to do was reboot (without zapping the P-RAM). FWIW I had a *lot* of Chrome tabs open and hadn't rebooted in several days. But just shutting down and restarting the Mac did the trick.

Once again, the problem will return as soon as Chrome downloads another newer version in the background. Your advice is not especially useful as it does not solve the root of the problem nor prevent it from recurring the in the future.

Please note that clearing your NVRAM / PRAM has absolutely nothing to do with this issue and is an overused "fixall" piece of advice that is 100% unrelated to this issue.

I am going to continue to link to my earlier post so it doesn't get buried. The Chromium team has acknowledged this bug and they are working on it. Updating your build of Chrome is not a long-term solution until the root bug has been fixed. Please do not reset your PRAM for this reason.

The solution is to update Google Chrome. This issue popped up on both my desktop and my laptop at the exact same time.

I went to Chrome / About Google Chrome which launched the Chrome Settings page.

There I noticed that an update was still pending. When I completed the update (relaunched Chrome) links clicked in Apple Mail now work correctly.

This should not be the accepted answer.

While it is possible, that restarting the Mac solved the issue (by giving Chrome the chance to restart and apply an update) - the key combination you was told to press is the good old "parameter ram reset".

Do you have troubles with your soundcard, your screen resolution, the start volume, etc.: Do a parameter RAM reset. Do you have troubles with software like a browser and links: This is not the way to go.

Wendy, this worked for me too. Outlook now opens properly.

Also, this fix restored some of the icons that were no longer displaying in the menu at the side of the screen which had disappeared when I updated the OS about a week ago.

In summary, my iMac seems to be working fine now.

Thanks

First: The answer is there already - please update and restart Chrome!

Second: To keep all your open tabs, just close Chrome (CMD-Q) and reopen it. You'll be able to reopen the tabs that were open before you killed Chrome at "History > Recently Closed > Restore all Tabs"

Alternatively you can use "Bookmarks > Bookmark all Tabs (Shift-CMD-D)" in order to create a bookmark list of all open tabs to recover them later.

This recently started to happen on my Macbook w/High Sierra 10.13.1.

I saw the post regarding the fix - restart and hold down 4 keys but that wasn't necessary for me.

I needed to update my Google Chrome. Once the update was complete, problem solved.

The temporary fix is just quitting Chrome, and then relaunching it. This is why updating Chrome, zapping your PRAM, reloading chrome, etc all seem to work, because they all cause the browser to quit and relaunch. Do not yet know the cause, but to get working again you just need to quit the browser.

Found on Google Chrome support:

Click on the 3 vertical dots ("Customize and control Google Chrome" when you hover over it).

Click Help / About Google Chrome / RELAUNCH

That solved this issue for me, which seemed to only pop up after the latest High Sierra update (Jan 2018).

NOTE: I did *NOT* lose any of my open Chrome tabs when I did this. Easy fix!

Wendy, this worked for me too. Outlook now opens properly.

Also, this fix restored some of the icons that were no longer displaying in the menu at the side of the screen which had disappeared when I updated the OS about a week ago.

In summary, my iMac seems to be working fine now.

Thanks

Also what also seemed to work for me was to make sure that I was properly signed into my various accounts after I had cleared my browsing history.

So the solution seemed very simple in the end.

Note, I am using the latest versions of all MAC, Chrome, and Microsoft software.

Some new, canonical information:

The Chromium team has identified and acknowledged this bug in High Sierra.

The underlying issue is that after Chrome finishes a silent background autoupdate (but before it has been relaunched to install the update), links are no longer being passed to the correct version of the running browser. It's been especially hard to track this down because relaunching the browser would fix the issue since that would launch the new, updated version.

There is currently no known workaround besides restarting the browser to apply the pending update. Resetting PRAM and any other catch-all maintenance fix is not a direct solution, and the only reason it works is simply because the newer version of Chrome is now where the link is being routed to. The issue will absolutely reoccur as soon as Chrome has a pending autoupdate that has not installed.

They have it as a Priority level 1, so hopefully we see a fix for this on the stable channel soon. Here is the issue in the Issue Tracker: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=777863

Just update your web browser (google chrome) and you'll be fine.

Once again, the problem will return as soon as Chrome downloads another newer version in the background. Your advice is not especially useful as it does not solve the root of the problem nor prevent it from recurring the in the future.