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Whenever I want to switch to a tab other than the one that is being rendered, Chrome hangs for about 2 seconds before rendering the new tab. This occurs whenever a new tab has to be showed, such as clicking the "New Tab" button, or closing the current tab.

Here's my version information:

Google Chrome 14.0.835.163 (Official Build 101024)

OS:Linux (Ubuntu 11.04)

WebKit 535.1 (branches/chromium/835@94713)

The only extension I use is AdBlock, and disabling it had no effect.

This has only been occurring to me since I updated to the most recent version of Chrome.

Any idea on what's going on?

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Have you tried disabling the default "New Tab"-Page? You can do so with the extension "New Tab Redirect". Try changing it to about:blank. Does it make any difference? – Duijf Sep 19 '11 at 20:23
I'm not sure if I was clear. This happens even if I have two tabs open, say one on www.google.com, and another on www.youtube.com, and I want to switch from one to the other (also, the problem doesn't depend on the content of the tabs: I can have two tabs on about:version, and switching between them causes the delay). – Alex Dias Sep 19 '11 at 20:31
As far as I was able to see, there were no bug reports about this problem. Could it be a conflicting application? – Duijf Sep 19 '11 at 20:45
Perhaps, even though this occurs also when not much else is running. Just before I updated Chrome (which caused the issue), I installed gcc-4.4, g++-4.4 and their dependencies (giving me two versions of both gcc and g++: 4.4 and 4.5). However, doing this on a live cd didn't cause any problems, so I guess the two installed versions of gcc and g++ aren't what's causing the problem. Also, I just installed Chromium, and the problem does not exist there. – Alex Dias Sep 19 '11 at 20:52
Interestingly, this started to happen to me just now when updating to a new version on 2012-04-13. It now happens with stable, unstable and beta builds. I see many other intermittent bug reports on this subject, but no real answers. I'll continue investigations. – Daniel Andersson Apr 13 at 14:43
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2 Answers

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Since Google Chrome's tabs are trapezoidal, they use a specific function in the driver called "trapezoidal acceleration", which is supported in hardware by newer Nvidia circuits.

On older circuits without this support, there was a bug that showed up in combination with upgrades to X.org 1.11 (where I guess X.org started supporting direct trapezoidal rendering) which made trapezoidal rendering much slower than it should have to be (much slower than it was with earlier driver/X.org server combinations). I run a GeForce 9400 which is one of the affected circuits.

The Debian bug report.

The Nvidia driver fix announcement in 290.03.

Personally I had this issue with even newer Nvidia versions (295.40), which persisted through a restart, but for some reason just launching nvidia-settings fixed it.

Chrome is still a lot slower than e.g. Opera in tab switching and creation on my machine, but it no longer induces delays of several seconds. From all I can tell, it is back to the speed it was before the bug introduction.

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I encountered a similiar behaviour with tabs that weren't (pre)rendered in the background anymore and sometimes not even when brought up front. Fortunately I remembered having activated the GPU-Compositing in about:flags (which worked fine until one or two weeks ago). Disabeling it again solved this issue.

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