Chromium tabs freeze with two windows on Wayland (Xwayland)

[Alberto Donato]

Original description:
When using Chromium (snap) on Wayland (gnome-session), if I keep two windows open on different workspaces, sometimes the current tab becomes unusable as it freezes or is super-slow.

This usually happens with specific pages open, like youtube, mattermost, google drive.

Minimizing one of the two windows makes the other work fine.

The issues does not happen if both windows are on the same workspace.

I've seen this issue in 20.04 and 20.10, always on Wayland sessions. The same behavior doesn't happen on a plain X11 session.

---

Updates:
As for #1916458 this behaviour may happen also on the same workspace and with Google Chrome

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 20.10
Package: gnome-shell 3.38.1-1ubuntu1.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.8.0-29.31-generic 5.8.14
Uname: Linux 5.8.0-29-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: zfs zunicode zavl icp zcommon znvpair
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu50.2
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: skip
CurrentDesktop: GNOME
Date: Fri Dec 4 09:39:08 2020
DisplayManager: gdm3
InstallationDate: Installed on 2020-10-18 (46 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 20.10 "Groovy Gorilla" - Beta amd64 (20200930)
RelatedPackageVersions: mutter-common 3.38.1-2ubuntu1
SourcePackage: gnome-shell
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[fcole90 (fcole90)]

I recently noted that if I put a window over the other, the bug appears, but if I put one next to the other, then everything works fine and smooth

[fcole90 (fcole90)]

Since few days, I'm experiencing the same behaviour under X. Shall I open a separate report for that?

[Dimitris Moraitidis (dimisjim)]

Any news regarding this?

This pretty much blocks me from switching to Wayland in Ubuntu 22.04

[hami hamza (hamzapped)]

So this issue was reported in 2020 and is still an issue in 2023...

Using KDE on manjaro linux.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

If you experience the issue on Manjaro then please subscribe to https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1563 instead...

Although there is also this menu bug at the moment which is a little bit similar: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1427954

[Mauro Gaspari (ilvipero)]

I have the exact same issue as described by original report. Two windows of the browser on different workspaces, only happens when I use Wayland session. I collected more data on this:

Release: Ubuntu Noble Numbat 24.04 and Ubuntu Mantic Minotaur 23.10
Hardware: Dell Inspiron-16-Plus-7620, i7-12700H, 32GB RAM.
Browsers tested: Vivaldi (deb), Brave (deb), Brave (snap), Chromium (snap)

As suggested by @vanvugt , I switched one browser setting, and it immediately solved the issue for me on all browsers affected.

chrome://flags/#ozone-platform-hint
Changed from default (always use x11), to auto (try wayland first, fallback to x11).

It is quite easy to check that the setting is applied, by running this on the browser: chrome://gpu/
Searching the text for "ozone" I can see the following:

--ozone-platform-hint=auto
--ozone-platform=wayland

I hope this helps. Please let me know if further testing is required.