Chromium causes system hang on certain pages

[raybarrera]

System details

AMD Ryzen 9 5900x, NVIDIA RTX 3080, 32GB RAM, Omarchy 3.2.1

What's wrong?

Having a hard time narrowing this down due to the nature of the issue, but I have found at least one site that I can repro with 100% of the time: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-laptop

Essentially, with some pages, I get severe performance degradation--stutters and whatnot. I've noticed on X, I see a lot of video stutter and/or flickering. Eventually, the page tab will hang, and any other tabs with video will hang, before eventually crashing (also slowing the whole system down in the process). In some more extreme cases, the whole system will just hang outright unless I close the tabs in question.

The page I listed above immediately hangs on load, and if left running has caused my whole system to hang, requiring a hard reset via power button.

I've seen somewhat related-sounding reports on iGPUs and older systems, but I'm encountering this on a desktop with a discrete GPU (RTX 3080). I can't pin down exactly when this started happening, but was not an issue prior to upgrading to 3.0. Adding the --use-gl=desktop flag kind of solves the crash/hang issues, but then video playback on youtube and other platforms is basically a slideshow.

[melpomenex]

I have the same issue. I have a 5900x, RTX 2060 super, 32GB of ram. Your example page hangs for me too.

[raybarrera]

Update:
I updated Omarchy today, which also grabbed the latest kernel, and the link above now seems fine. Didn't see anything in the Omarchy notes, so I'm assuming an upstream change fixed this.
FWIW, Fizzy was also causing a similar hang up (presumably the embedded video player in the orientation card)

[FreshFruths]

Not sure if it this issue been fixed but I'm on OS: Omarchy 3.2.3 and I still have the freezing issue when scrolling through feed on X and more promimently on https://www.revolut.com/en-US/ landing page (in the second section with video background). Similar to Ray, I had tried a few different flags and eventually disabling hardware acceleration, everything felt choppy so I have switched to Zen browser instead for now.

Problem is when I set a non Chromium browser as default, web apps do not seem to work, probably something to do with frameless mode support. I had to work around that by leaving a Chromium based browser as default while setting a keybind for the actual browser I want to use.

[TheShiveshNetwork]

Hey, I had a similar issue with flickering pages on some websites and hanging videos. Doing some research this was a nvidia graphics rendering issue for me. Updating the limine config with this line fixed everything for me:

cmdline: quiet splash root=PARTUUID=<puuid> zswap.enabled=0 rw rootfstype=btrfs nvidia-drm.modeset=1 nvidia.NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations=1

[KonradPerssonSE]

I hit a very similar Chromium issue on Omarchy (tab becomes unusable when scrolling past embedded video / background video; jittery loop, sometimes looks like it’s about to hang).

What fixed it for me was forcing Chromium to run under XWayland (X11) instead of native Wayland.

Test (temporary, safe profile):

pkill chromium
chromium --user-data-dir=/tmp/chromium-x11-test --ozone-platform=x11 "<problem-url>"

If that fixes it, make it permanent (Arch/Omarchy supported):

printf '%s\n' '--ozone-platform=x11' > ~/.config/chromium-flags.conf
pkill chromium
chromium

(For Google Chrome the equivalent is ~/.config/chrome-flags.conf.)

This kept everything smooth for me. Might help others reproduce/confirm it’s a Wayland+Chromium path issue.

[raybarrera]

Will give this a shot. The error has been happening far less often and reproducibly for me, but I did run into it recently, so its worth a shot.

How does that flag play with:
--ozone-platform=wayland
--ozone-platform-hint=wayland

[Antintuitivo]

I started having this problem after the quattro update, this solution still works.

[shyyawn]

It only happens to me when there is a floating logo in the video, I think that is a feature that the uploader of the youtube video can enable,

Only video that have the floating icon in the video hangs for me on the latest omarchy and chromium

Example this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwSFuWOoJNg&t=8s&pp=0gcJCaIKAYcqIYzv

[shyyawn]

I was able to fix my issue, it's specifically videos with transparent overlays (like that floating logo) that cause Chromium to flicker and then completely freeze. Audio keeps playing but the video is stuck and you can't interact with the player at all.

Just add these two lines to ~/.config/chromium-flags.conf:

--use-angle=vulkan
--use-cmd-decoder=passthrough

Restarted Chromium and those videos work fine now.

[ahsuunn]

I was having the same issue on Chrome when watching youtube video or just scrolling on X. The fix above worked for me just fine thanks.

[Antintuitivo]

I tried this fix and it works, but makes chromium far slower on startup.
If that happens to someone else, try setting --ozone-platform and --ozone-platform-hint to x11

[YusufGandhi]

I am using Brave and resolved this by turning off: Settings > System > Use graphics acceleration when available.