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Sandu Ursu
Asked: 2018-09-08 04:43:11 +0800 CST

Chrome address bar & tabs turn black

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My machine has Ubuntu 18.04 installed.

I use Google Chrome and I often work with Jupyter Notebooks.

When I launch the browser everything seems to work fine. After some time (~ 1-2 hours) the address bar and the tabs part turn black as shown below.

enter image description here

Not happy.

Graphics Card: NVIDIA Quadro M4000

The problem persists both when I use the NVIDIA proprietary driver and when I use the open source X.Org X server driver.

drivers nvidia graphics google-chrome 18.04

3 Answers

  1. I have exactly the same issue with Chromium and Quadro M4000M (ThinkPad P70) on Arch Linux (xmonad, nouveau). So my conclusion is, that there is a bug in chromium that was introduced in the last year. Probably Quadro / M4000 related. It worked before with Nouveau and Nvidia driver.

    I am not aware of any solution to fix it, but there are some workarounds:

    • You can drag and drop the tabs to another browser window and recover them manually.

    • You can use a browser plugin like OneTab to save and close all affected tabs. Then open a new window and restore all saved tabs (use mouse hover to find the OneTab button).

    • Disabling hardware acceleration in chrome settings could work, but you will lose some rendering performance.

    Check results of chrome://gpu - It reports some issues for my system, not sure if it is related.

    Could be related to GL ERROR :GL_OUT_OF_MEMORY : GLES2DecoderImpl::DoBindTexImage2DCHROMIUM: <- error from previous GL command

    Update 1: I have created a bug report here: Issue 893117

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  2. It appears that there's an issue with the default display drivers on Ubuntu 18.04. I ran into the same issue ever since I installed (and reinstalled) Chrome and a possible work around is to use an alternative display driver.

    I followed instructions from this page: https://www.linuxbabe.com/ubuntu/install-nvidia-driver-ubuntu-18-04

    To summarize:

    • Search for Software & Updates:

    Software & Updates

    • Navigate to Additional Drivers (it might take a few seconds to load):

    Drivers

    • Select something other than the default X.Org.X server. This might require a reboot but since making the change I haven't had the Chrome issue happen again.
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  3. I had this issue with nvidia driver version 450.66 & an Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti. Try opening chrome://settings and disable "Use hardware accelleration when available", it worked for me.

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