Whatapp web constantly flickering

Question

I am running Ubuntu 16.04

I started running whatsapp web for chrome today and the screen is constantly flickering.

It didn't happen earlier. Also it doesn't happen with Windows.

Why is it happening?

What GPU do you have? Did you installed any drivers for it? Could be a problem of Chrome (and causes that), or of the GPU driver. — melchor629, Aug 09 '16 at 19:25
Is possible that issue is caused by the GPU driver, because is not officially supported, and could have some strange incompatibilities with 16.04 and the Linux kernel. — melchor629, Aug 09 '16 at 19:35
I seriously doubt it as other things like flash videos, intensive video games are all working fine — rancho, Aug 09 '16 at 19:37
Then, I only could think that Chrome has something weird while rendering WhatsApp Web. Did you tried with Firefox? The flickering happen in Firefox too? — melchor629, Aug 09 '16 at 19:39
However the app is available only in chrome web store. For Firefox it is out of reach. — rancho, Aug 09 '16 at 19:45
In any browser, WhatsApp Web is accessible from http://web.whatsapp.com. Easy as that. Try it. — melchor629, Aug 09 '16 at 19:46
I wouldn't post it as an answer because it's a workaround and not a fix. I have this happening as well with an NVIDIA card. So it has something to do with Chrome itself and not a specific video driver.
This happens to me on Ubuntu and not Debian 8, so this is specific to Ubuntu + Chrome — Routhinator, Aug 09 '17 at 19:38

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 09 '17 at 19:43

I disabled hardware acceleration for my browser from Settings > Advance Settings > System > uncheck the hardware acceleration

This is something to do with hardware accelleration on Ubuntu. In my case I am running 17.10 and using an NVIDIA card.

I switched to a machine with the exact same card and driver, but running Debian 8, and the problem did not exist.

So while we have a fix, this indicates a problem unique to Ubuntu + Chrome, and not the video drivers specifically.

1 Answers1