Black boxes and Rendering Issues in Chrome 52

If you’ve been experience performance issues in Chrome 52 stable on a Mac, including black boxes rendering where content should be or any other strange OOM (out of memory) issues, you’re not alone.

Black boxes in Chrome 52

Myself and some other users spent a few days testing and giving feedback to the Chromium team and figured out that Tweetdeck (web) is the culprit.

(Tweetdeck is spawning multiple accelerated h264 decoder instances for every GIF, and due to the live nature of Tweetdecks columns the video decoder intances continue to multiply, eventually maxing out. More about the issue here.)

The Fix

If you’re effected the best solutions are:

  • Turn off image previews in all your Tweetdeck columns, or
  • Close Tweetdeck in Chrome entirely and run the standalone Mac app, or
  • Refresh (or close and open) the Tweetdeck tab very regularly

Hopefully the Tweetdeck team will roll out a fix in the near future. They’re on the case.

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