How To Fix Rendering Issues in Chrome on Ubuntu

I’ve noticed that whenever I put my Ubuntu laptop to sleep (e. g. by closing the lid), when I wake it back up my Google Chrome browser has drawing issues. Sometimes it’s a lot of black rectangles (like in the image above). Sometimes it’s a rainstorm of tiny blue and yellow rectangles. But no matter what, the only way to clear it up is to close and restart Chrome.

Like with anything in life, if you need help, you do an Internet search. And I found this one article that talks about a similar phenomenon, but it’s with Chrome on Mac, and it’s a bunch of blue horizontal lines. The fix it suggests is to disable hardware acceleration. It’s for fixing Chrome on Mac, but I decided to try it on Ubuntu.

Fixing The Redraw Issue on Ubuntu

1 — Open the Chrome menu, and go to Settings:

2 — Expand “Advanced”, and click on “System”:

3 — Disable “Use hardware acceleration when available”, and click “Relaunch”:

Chrome will start back up with “hardware acceleration” disabled.

Now when I put my system to sleep, and bring it back up, Chrome comes back up just fine, with no redrawing issues! So it appears the advice in the aforementioned macReports article works for Ubuntu as well.

What Is Hardware Acceleration? Will There Be Problems If It’s Turned Off?

This CNet article explains that hardware acceleration allows Chrome to make use of the GPU for some page rendering and loading tasks. It references another article that debates whether hardware acceleration actually does any good. However, this Google support thread discusses another solution if turning off hardware acceleration causes problems. It suggests instead that you can go to chrome://flags and turn off “Hardware-accelerated video decode”. I have not tried this myself. So far, the above approach has worked fine for me, and I’ve not had issues so far. However, that support thread might also offer some good suggestions if you notice other rendering or performance issues in Google Chrome.