I’ve been having crazy problems with Chrome hanging on my Virtualbox build.  I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why Chrome was causing Ubuntu’s rendering to crash.  All of a sudden when visiting a random site such as https://chrome.google.com/webstore, the virtual machine would turn all black or all white or rendering would be all sorts of crazy where I can’t click on anything ( objects are there, I can move windows around and what not, but they wouldn’t render as they really are ). I am at that point forced to hit alt+f2 and sudo poweroff as a sudo reboot would sometimes bring Ubuntu back up with the same rendering issues.

After much digging, I came across http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1974800 with a suggestion of starting Chrome with the following command:

google-chrome --blacklist-accelerated-compositing

I’ve come to find out that this may have resolved my rending issue!  It seems to be more related to Virtualbox and how it’s handling 3D acceleration.

To update the desktop/launcher icons you can run:

locate google-chrome.desktop

Which will probably give you the following:

/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome.desktop
/usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop

Really, the only one you need to edit is the one in your /usr/share/applications/.  You can also copy that file to ~/.local/share/applications/ and add

--blacklist-accelerated-compositing to the end of any "Exec=" line ( should be three -- one for first opening Chrome, one