davidbau.com

A Bad Chrome Bug

The latest version of Chrome has a bad bug that seems specific to the GPU in my (Samsung series 9) laptop. It actually took me a couple days to notice the problem and realize it was Chrome's fault and not the fault of the underlying website.

Here is the bug: when you visit a fast website that has no images (and no javascript-rendered changing content), Chrome does not render anything. It just leaves the page blank. It will render as soon as you scroll or cause something to redraw.

My laptop does not have an exotic configuration - it is a 2012-era windows laptop with a very vanilla Windows 7 setup, so I suspect many people may be affected by the bug.

The funny thing, the bug is something you may not have noticed because almost every webpage we might visit day-to-day contains an image. And pages that do not have images - well, as soon as you scroll, they render, so you might have thought that the webpage was slow and then popped in when you scrolled.

If you use Chrome, try it out on your computer. Does it happen to you? To test, here are a couple links to webpages that have no images. If they render for you, try pressing "refresh" to see if they render once they're cached and fast:

http://www.htmlandcssbook.com/code-samples/chapter-01/example.html

http://davidbau.com/bugreport/simplest-document-broken.html

If you see the problem, put in information about your hardware, and vote for the bug to be fixed here:

(Update: found an old issue that appears to have reported the same problem in beta - https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=325309)

Posted by David at January 19, 2014 10:58 AM