Why do 13 characters crash Chrome on a Mac

Question

Why does the following string of characters crash Google Chrome on a Mac?

^{The actual string can be found on this jsbin}

I've read all about it but nobody has given any answer as to why it actually happens.

Does anybody actually know why this happens and can explain?

Answer 1

It is not publicly known why this happens, but Google is aware of the issue. If you're really interested, you could look into the crash report shown on that thread and try to investigate.

There are workarounds available by downloading certain fonts such as Syriac or Thaana, so the problem could be simply that the rendering of that character sequence is not supported by the default fonts installed when using Chrome on a Mac.