How to fix Google Chrome black screen issues

Google Chrome started to act up weirdly on one of my machines recently. I noticed display issues at first; Chrome would not show the content of sites I opened unless I changed the window size of the browser first.

Yesterday, things got even weirder as the browser showed a black screen only when I started it. I could use the right-click context menu and access Chrome menus, but did not see any page content regardless of what I did.

Fix Google Chrome black screen issues

Below is a screenshot of the Chrome browser window when I started it on a machine running Windows 10 Pro.

Chrome black screen

A restart of the web browser or the system did not resolve the issue. It was a display issue, clearly, and the first thing that I tried was updating the graphics driver to see if it would resolve the issue. Turns out, it did not.

I then tried reinstalling Chrome, but that did not resolve the issue either. The next thing I did, did however. I set the compatibility of the process to Windows 7 which resolved the black screen issue in the web browser.

Here is how you can change the compatibility level of the Chrome process on Windows machines:

1. Right-click on the Chrome shortcut and select properties. If you right-click on the Chrome icon pinned to the taskbar, you may need to right-click on Google Chrome again when the context menu opens before you get a chance to click on the properties entry.
2. Switch to the compatibility tab in the Properties window.
3. Check the "run this program in compatibility mode for" box.
4. Select Windows 7 from the list of available operating system versions.
5. Select apply, and then ok.

Start Google Chrome to find out if the issue is resolved. If it is not, you may want to try and set the compatibility mode to another version of Windows, e.g. Windows Vista SP2 or Windows 8, and try again.

Setting the compatibility to Windows 7 resolved the black screen issue in Chrome on the system. I noticed however that the directive was not saved properly. A recheck of the compatibility mode menu revealed that the box to run the program in compatibility mode was not checked anymore. Still, the issue was resolved despite that.