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1. How To Hack Running Fred On Google Chrome
2. Running Fred On Google Chrome

Right-click on the Chrome shortcut and select properties. If you right-click on the Chrome icon pinned to the taskbar, you may need to right-click on Google Chrome again when the context menu opens before you get a chance to click on the properties entry. Switch to the compatibility tab in the Properties window.

Google Chrome started to act up weirdly on one of my machines recently. I noticed display issues at first; Chrome would not show the content of sites I opened unless I changed the window size of the browser first.

Yesterday, things got even weirder as the browser showed a black screen only when I started it. I could use the right-click context menu and access Chrome menus, but did not see any page content regardless of what I did.

Fix Google Chrome black screen issues

Below is a screenshot of the Chrome browser window when I started it on a machine running Windows 10 Pro.

A restart of the web browser or the system did not resolve the issue. It was a display issue, clearly, and the first thing that I tried was updating the graphics driver to see if it would resolve the issue. Turns out, it did not.

I then tried reinstalling Chrome, but that did not resolve the issue either. The next thing I did, did however. I set the compatibility of the process to Windows 7 which resolved the black screen issue in the web browser.

Here is how you can change the compatibility level of the Chrome process on Windows machines:

1. Right-click on the Chrome shortcut and select properties. If you right-click on the Chrome icon pinned to the taskbar, you may need to right-click on Google Chrome again when the context menu opens before you get a chance to click on the properties entry.
2. Switch to the compatibility tab in the Properties window.
3. Check the 'run this program in compatibility mode for' box.
4. Select Windows 7 from the list of available operating system versions.
5. Select apply, and then ok.
6. Note: If you notice that the issue is fixed temporarily only, open the properties dialog again and click on 'change settings for all users' to fix it permanently.

Start Google Chrome to find out if the issue is resolved. If it is not, you may want to try and set the compatibility mode to another version of Windows, e.g. Windows Vista SP2 or Windows 8, and try again.

Setting the compatibility to Windows 7 resolved the black screen issue in Chrome on the system. I noticed however that the directive was not saved properly. A recheck of the compatibility mode menu revealed that the box to run the program in compatibility mode was not checked anymore. Still, the issue was resolved despite that.

While Google gets to work fixing the Chrome battery drain issue affecting Windows users, an easy interim solution may help preserve laptop battery life in the meantime.

How To Hack Running Fred On Google Chrome

The fix? Closing the browser when it’s not needed.

Captain Obvious

Historically, closing an application in Windows is straightforward: you click or tap on the ‘x’ window control button and that’s it; it’s closed.

However, this isn’t always the case with Google Chrome.

Running Fred On Google Chrome

Just closing the Google Chrome window doesn’t quit the browser fully. The browser continues to run in the background on Windows (and Linux) systems — something you might never notice.

Why does Chrome run in the background?

Whether this happens (or not) depends on the sort of applications and extensions you have installed in Chrome.

Some apps and extension can “ask” the browser to stay awake so that they can continue to function; e.g., to deliver notifications of new e-mail messages, or keep a chat alive.

Google used to make it easy to tell when background apps were active as it’d show a Google Chrome icon in the system tray (bottom right corner of your desktop screen). This showed a list of active tasks and a proper ‘Exit’ option.

However, that feature was removed several releases ago.

But the good news is that you can stop Chrome from running in the background entirely (i.e., so that it always exits when closed), regardless of extensions or apps — all you have to do is tell it to!

How to Stop Chrome Running in the Background

If you use Windows 10 you can turn off Chrome’s background persistence from the browser’s settings page, like so:

• Open the Chrome menu (press Alt + E)
• Select Settings
• In the sidebar of the settings page click the ‘Advanced‘ heading
• Click the section named ‘System‘
• Slide the “Continue running background apps when Google Chrome is closed” toggle to off

And that’s it; Chrome will instantly take heed of your settings and will no longer run in the background.

You can re-enable the feature, i.e. make Chrome run in the background all the time, again just as easily, just follow the steps above but flick the final toggle from off to on.