I don't know how widespread the issue is but user reports on Google's official Google Chrome Help forum indicate that some Chrome users see a black bar at the bottom of the screen when using Google Chrome.

The issue was first reported on April 25 by a user who wrote "When in Chrome, there is a black horizontal bar across the bottom of the screen that I can't get rid of".

The bar sits on top of the browser user interface and hides certain information that Chrome displays there. Any content that gets downloaded is displayed in the area and the black bar overshadows it so that it cannot be interacted with according to the user.

Img

The issue has been ongoing with recent Chrome Stable releases affected by it. Google Community Specialists suggested a number of things including running in Incognito Mode, creating a new user, running the Chrome Cleanup Tool, running a virus scan, or even reinstalling Chrome, but none fixed the issue according to users affected by it.

Some users reported that disabling hardware acceleration helped fix the issue but this was not the case for everyone who experienced it and the issue came back at least once for a user.

You can try disabling hardware acceleration by opening chrome://settings/ in the Chrome address bar, scrolling down and clicking on advanced, and toggling "Use hardware acceleration when available" to off under the System category a bit further down the page.

Users could try and install driver updates for the video card if available.

There is a workaround that helps users 100% of the time, however. You can get rid of the black bar for the session by entering fullscreen mode and exiting it again. Just tap on F11 to enter Chrome's fullscreen mode and F11 again to exit it.

If you experienced a black bar in Chrome it should be gone by the time Chrome returns to normal display mode.

It is interesting to note that the issue appears to affect other applications such as VLC or Firefox as well as some users reported that. Not all users revealed the operating system used on the machines they experienced the issue but those who did ran Windows 10 systems.

Since Chrome is not the only program affected, it is likely that the issue is either related to display drivers (a combination of hardware and drivers), or a Windows-specific issue as no user on Linux or Mac has reported the issue yet.