How To Fix Black Boxes or Rectangles that appear on Google Chrome

If upgrading to the latest version of Google Chrome does not fix the annoying black box/rectangle bug that sometimes occur for a select number of Chrome users, please follow one of the methods below to attempt at resolving the problem.

Create a new user profile

From my experience, this method only fixed the problem temporarily.

1. Open Google Chrome.
2. Click the 3 bar icon (menu) to the top-right corner of the browser.
3. Click on ‘Settings’.
4. Under the People heading, choose the button to add another person.
5. Complete any necessary details and switch to that profile while surfing the Internet.

Disable Hardware Acceleration

1. Open Google Chrome.
2. Click the 3 bar icon (menu) to the top-right corner of the browser.
3. Click on ‘Settings’.
4. Scroll down and select ‘Show Advanced Settings’.
5. Under the System heading, unmark “Use hardware acceleration when available”.

Disable Extensions

Some extensions such as a flash player for example may be the cause of the issue.

1. Open Google Chrome.
2. Click the 3 bar icon (menu) to the top-right corner of the browser.
3. Hover your mouse over ‘More Tools’ and select ‘Extensions’.
4. Disable all extensions and see if the problem has been resolved.

Disabling GPU in Google Chrome

If nothing else works, the problem is most likely caused by your computer’s GPU.

1. Close Google Chrome completely.
2. Find where Google Chrome is located on your computer and right-click the icon.
3. Select Properties.
4. Find the ‘Target’ field and at the end, type in –disable-gpu (as seen in the screenshot below)
5. Click ‘Apply’, followed by ‘OK’.

Open up Google Chrome and you should no longer see those black boxes/rectangles anymore.

If you’re still encountering them, you should consider running a virus scan on your computer since it might be infected. We here at PCG Pedia recommend Bitdefender.