Nov 14, 2019

Chrome tabs intermittent hang or crash with white screen

Environment:
* VM hosted on ESXi
* Windows Server 2012R2 (v6.3 build 9600) with patches current to Oct 2019
* Server is running remote desktop services
* Server is part of a Windows domain
* Domain is using Google provided group policy templates
* User count on the server is about 20
* Chrome version 78.0.3904.97 (stable)
* Antivirus in use: Trendmicro Serverprotect

Problem description:
Our users, at seemingly random intervals, experience their tabs going completely white and becoming non responsive. The portion of the tab that fails is only the rendering portion of the rendering pane. When the issue occurs, the display pane for the tab goes completely white. This is the case even if the site in the tab has been completely loaded. The browser its self does stay active. While all functions are operational above the display pane, the pane its self is completely unresponsive to input. As an example, with a tab experiencing the issue in focus, pressing F12 to access developer tools does nothing. With the same tab in focus, you can use the chrome browser menu to invoke the developer tools and they will be displayed as expected. Another example is right clicks or keyboard input into the failed pane is non responsive. Issuing input to the browser, such as reloading the pane or opening a new tab, gets the expected result. An immediate fix to the failed tabs can be to restart the browser, however, after a significant wait, they will regain functionality. Our timing puts the wait at somewhere around 15 minutes. Also, as a note, when using procmon to inspect the PIDs of the failed tabs, we can see the constant creation and termination of threads. Those threads however, seem to do nothing.

Attempted Solutions:
* disabling hardware acceleration: no change
* disabling 3d graphics apis: no change
* disabling antivirus: no change
* running chrome with administrative privilege: no change
* clearing chrome cache: no change
* server reboot: no change
* firewall reboot: no change

Notes:

I'd say its safe to say we are running out of ideas here. As a last resort we may try a re-install of Chrome, but I am wary of causing our users to lose settings, bookmarks, passwords and such. At this point I'm even wondering if a downgrade is possible. If anyone has any insight, we could use some help.

Thanks,
D.

Edit: 11/14/2019
Thanks to the input from many sysadmins we have more info and possible workarounds. I'll list them below.

* Most effective workaround thus far: Turn off Occlusion in chrome://flags. Unfortunately this can not be set via GPO.

* Replicating the problem: We can successfully recreate the issue by having two users on the same RDS server running chrome with multiple tabs. User 1 issues a force lock of their session via Win+L. User 2 then experiences their tabs becoming hung / locked.

* When a user experiences the problem, minimizing chrome and then bringing it back into focus will make the website content visible again, however, in our experience, tab functionality is not restored.

* Command line arguments: some arguments disabling chrome features have been discussed. We have not tried any of those yet.

* For admins with larger networks it has been reported that this command line argument may help as opposed to setting the Occlusion off in flags. --disable-backgrounding-occluded-windows. We have not tested this though.

Hope this helps out our fellow admins. Good luck.
D

Edit: 11/14/2019
* Link to the bug report on the chromium project: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1024837
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Last edited Nov 14, 2019
Recommended Answer
Nov 15, 2019
Our mission is for Chrome Browser to be fast and efficient. We’ve been working on an optimization for when Chrome is hidden behind another window, to avoid having to draw content that a user will never see.

This optimization was tested in the Beta channel of Chrome for the past 5 months, and was activated for all users of Chrome 78, on Nov 12.

After the roll out, we received reports that in some virtual environments, Chrome on Windows displays a blank page, which may be because Chrome mistakenly believes it's covered by another window. As soon as we confirmed the reports, the feature was disabled.

If Chrome on Windows is displaying blank pages, restart Chrome. On the next start, this feature will be disabled.

We also want to provide an explanation of how this change was rolled out. For some features, Chrome uses a gradual roll out process that happens more slowly than the main roll out. This allows us to quickly revert a change if we discover a bug that wasn't uncovered in prior testing.

Once we received reports of the problem, we were able to revert it immediately. We sincerely apologize for the disruption this cause
Community Manager Chrome Enterprise recommended this
Original Poster Digital ink marked this as an answer
Helpful?
All Replies (235)
Nov 14, 2019
We have an identical issue. Server 2012R2, Chrome 78.0.3904.97. RDS Server with 100 users.
Issue is as described above.
Nov 15, 2019
Well you get what you pay for right? Wait ... what did we pay again ...?
Nov 15, 2019
Lol, I thought my pc was dying since it's happening so often and town ads boards crashed too... Win...
Nov 15, 2019
Yep, your software sounds totally inappropriate to use if you care about security or privacy... this approach will be the death of google, I'm about to switch email and search engines... this ain't right.
Nov 16, 2019
my workaround was using firefox
Nov 17, 2019
Did you make my Pinterest crash? I have lost 2 of my Pinterest Boards. They just disappeared.
I contacted Pinterest all day Saturday but they are either closed or have not been able to fix the problem.
Nov 18, 2019
This weekend I removed the command line parameter workaround and today people are reporting white tabs again. I can repro it by locking a session. Why is this experiment still active with us?
Nov 18, 2019
Hello, I do not know if the problem is solved? , if I download version 78.0.3904.97 under https://cloud.google.com/chrome-enterprise/browser/download/ ?
or the stable version is not yet release?

G
Nov 18, 2019
Today I also had some people still reporting the issue on our Windows 2008R2 remote desktop server. Even after the server was restarted Sunday! How to prevent this updates in the future? Blocking google update services makes no difference, so please bring out a version or way to block all updates for a Remote desktop environment.
Nov 18, 2019
Confirming, the feature has been disabled. If users are seeing blank pages, restart Chrome. On the next start, this feature should be disabled.

If you're still experiencing issues after restarting Chrome, please see instructions here to verify the change was applied:  https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1024837#c97
Nov 18, 2019
Hi Guys. What you've done was unacceptable. 
Hundreds of thousands of users affected because you wanted "enable a nice feature" without notifying anyone. For being sneaky, peaky you have lost thousands of users. They will never go back. Only because you wanted to be "smart" and ignored any reasonable approach to any updates. And once sysadmins pointed out what is the problem, you then hide behind your not so smart ultra-safe answer like politicians do? Shame on you Google. What you've done was a prove, that you have no respect for any sysadmins, any IT support companies and your users.
Nov 18, 2019
It says to "restart Chrome" How can we restart chrome on a server? If we reinstall it, all of my end users will lose hours of work, bookmarks, ect. Is there a way to update or receive the updated version without uninstalling Chrome on the server?
Nov 19, 2019
Hello ,

Does the Chrome version 78.0.3904.108 take correction into account? 

G
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