Chromium/Chrome window is black in Ubuntu 16.04/18.04

Question

I have installed Chromium and Google Chrome, but the entire Chromium/Chrome window is black in Ubuntu 16.04/18.04. Does somebody know why?

Chromium installed with: sudo apt install chromium-browser

Google Chrome installed by downloading from https://www.google.com/chrome/ and double clicking the .deb file.

Screenshot:

Solution 1

Running Chrome with --use-gl=angle does the trick for me and I don't have to turn off the 3D acceleration. The command looks like this:

google-chrome --use-gl=angle

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However for the normal usage I've modified every exec line in /usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop and added the mentioned param, so it looks like this (notice there are three occurences of exec):

Exec=/usr/bin/google-chrome-stable %U --use-gl=angle

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Works in Ubuntu 16.10, VirtualBox 5.1.12

Solution 2

If you didn't solve it by now, the problem is with WebGL2, for more informations, read this:

Issue 602679

And like is said in the link, the fix for the black screen is running chrome with --use-gl=angle

It worked for me, hope it helps.

Best regards, Eugen.

Comments

[Admin]

How did you install them and which version? What model is your graphics adapter? Which graphics driver does it use?

[Admin]

@kevin-bowen Thanks for approving the edit. The question still shows as "closed". Could you reopen it? Thank you!

[Admin]

Well, apparently it's not easy to re-open a question. So I'm posting my answer here (and if it ever gets re-opened, I'll submit as a proper answer). You can try running chromium or google-chrome with this command line option --disable-gpu or --use-gl=angle. That should allow the window to render properly. Then you can go into the Chromium/Chrome Settings > Advanced, and uncheck "Use hardware acceleration when available". Then in the future you won't need the command line options.

[Videonauth]

Welcome to Ask Ubuntu! Whilst this may theoretically answer the question, it would be preferable to include the essential parts of the answer here, and provide the link for reference.

[Eugen Popescu]

Hi, I included the essential part of the answer "the fix for the black screen is running chrome with --use-gl=angle" and I provided the link first because the question was about why is that happening, and I pointed to that issue and then I provided the fix..

[Thomas Ward]

If this issue is identical to that in another post, please consider flagging this as a duplicate.