In Chrome on my PC, this vertical bar showed up on the left side of my browser. When I shrink the window, it now blocks my search results, and it's SO annoying! I've tried troubleshooting, searching and trying all kinds of settings and personalizations and got nowhere. Please help!

Hi everyone,

I've been experiencing a very annoying issue on YouTube for a while now, and I wanted to see if anyone else is facing the same bug or knows a fix.

The Issue: When watching videos in windowed mode, the video output is constantly blurry, even though the resolution is manually set to high (e.g., 1080p60 or 4K).

• Whenever I move my cursor over the timebar (progress bar), the video stutters and briefly sharpens into its actual high resolution for a split second, but goes back to being blurry as soon as I move the cursor away.
• If I open the Quality/Settings menu tab and keep it open on the player, the video plays at its full, sharp resolution continuously without any blurriness. As soon as I close the settings menu, it becomes blurry again.
• Fullscreen mode is completely fine and displays full native resolution with no issues.
• This problem was not present back in early 2025—videos used to play with full sharpness and clarity in both windowed and fullscreen modes.

What I have tried:

• I have clean-installed Windows multiple times (due to various unrelated reasons), but the problem persists across fresh setups.
• I asked several friends to test this on their PCs, and they reproduced the exact same behavior: blurry playback in windowed mode, a split-second sharpening when hovering over the timeline, and full sharpness only when the settings overlay is left open.

Has anyone else noticed this? Is this a YouTube player bug related to Ambient Mode, video rendering scaling, or GPU hardware acceleration, and is there any known workaround to fix it?

Any insights would be greatly appreciated!

I've looked online, in this subreddit, and under Google's own help center.
This just appeared today and the only way I can avoid it getting in the way of me seeing the whole website is by fully expanding the window, which is an inconvenience since I have to toggle back between Adobe, Zoom, etc.

Any help appreciated.

I use Chrome at work to access a private client webapp where I have to input information into text boxes. I typically use the auto-complete function of Chrome to fill in these text boxes, but the values I have to enter vary on a case-by-case basis. The auto-complete for these text boxes stopped saving new values to the auto-compelte list about 6 months ago, and ever since whenever I enter a new value that is not already in the auto-complete suggestions, it is not added to the list. I have tried deleting arbitrary values from the list in case the suggestions list was "full," they disappear and do not reappear on the list after re-entering them into the text boxes.

Is there a way I can configure Chrome to always save new auto-complete values for text boxes? I'm not certain why it stopped saving values, I did not change any settings in Chrome.

This update happened overnight, they moved the share button to within the search bar and replaced the original placement with Gemini AI. Does anyone know how to revert the placement or at the very least get rid of the AI button (not just disable)?

I just want the sites listed to be in the subfolder itself-- not create their own folder WITHIN that one. Is this possible? If I add one tab at a time, it doesn't do this, but I often have several things I'm looking into at once, it's much easier to select multiple tabs rather than save each one individually, you know?

I switched to Chrome from Safari recently, and it didn't do this, although the commands to add bookmarks/tabs/organize files or whatever all look the same.

ETA: I can go into bookmark manager and group the links within the sub-subfolder and click and drag them to the subfolder and then delete the sub-subfolder but I'd love to not have to do that...

See attached, sometimes the text highlight is black, and other times the text highlight is purple. But this only happens when browsing google, it's been happening roughly every other search.

Anyone else experiencing the same?

Can we please get a fix for this.

For about six months, Google search results in Chrome on Windows 11 would sometimes load with text that looked blurry and jagged (see the left image). Reloading the page (Ctrl+R) would fix it, but sometimes it took two, three or four reloads. It only ever happened on Google, never on other sites, and it happened in Incognito too, so it wasn't an extension.

At first, I thought this was related to GPU acceleration or a graphics driver glitch, or maybe something to do with font scaling. But it turns out that the text wasn't blurry. It was just using the Roboto Thin typeface instead of Roboto Regular, and that thin text on a dark background looks soft and aliased.

So in case anyone else might be having similar issues, here's the cause:

• Google's pages use the Roboto font, and Chrome will use a copy installed on your computer if it finds one.
• At some point I had activated a few Roboto typefaces through Adobe Fonts in Creative Cloud. My computer had Roboto Thin, Bold and Black, but no Regular.
• When Chrome picked the local copy and needed normal-weight text, the closest weight it had was Thin. Bold text matched exactly, which is why bold text always looked fine.
• Sometimes Chrome used Google's downloaded Roboto instead, which is why it was intermittent and why reloading sometimes fixed it.

How to check if this is your problem:

• On a page where the text looks wrong, right-click some thin text and choose Inspect.
• In DevTools, open the Computed tab and scroll to the bottom to "Rendered fonts."
• If it says something like "Roboto-Thin, Local file," congratulations. You have the same issue I did. On a good load, mine said "Roboto-Regular, Network resource."

How I fixed it:

• In Windows, go to Settings > Personalization > Fonts and search for Roboto. Mine only showed Thin, Black and Bold. There's no Uninstall button or Font file path, which means it was activated by a font manager rather than installed manually.
• In my case it was Adobe Fonts, so I opened Creative Cloud and removed Roboto.
• If you installed Roboto yourself, uninstall it from C:\Windows\Fonts or %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Fonts instead. Other font managers (FontBase, Skyfont, etc.) can cause the same thing.
• Restart Chrome. Google now always uses its own Roboto and the text looks normal every time.

Anyway... hope this helps someone else not spend six months tolerating an annoying but bearable Chrome issue until they finally build up the irritation, necessary dopamine, and access to LLMs to chase down a solution. 😅

Hi all, I have two separate questions. Every time I open chrome it gives me the prompt to "restore tabs" citing that it was not shut down properly. However, I always shut it down by using the "x"... I almost never leave it running if I close my laptop. Any idea how I can turn this off? I've tried turning off "continue running background apps" etc... but nothing changes.

My second question is kind of related: even when I have only one tab open, if I check Task Manager, I see that Chrome is running at least 15 tabs. I noticed this recently bc for some reason I noticed a slowdown and checked the system using memory and it's really high. For instance, it's showing that it's running 19 chrome tabs right now and using around 73% of memory even though I only have three tabs open.

What am I doing wrong and how do I fix this? TIA.

My Chrome data consumption has jumped from 13GB last month to 68GB this month, even though my daily usage time hasn't changed.

Woke up this morning and 70+ tabs I've had open for a long time have all disappeared? From the remaining open ones it looks like they're all older than a week that disappeared.

- Recent tabs & History show nothing from closed tabs

- Manage Windows isn't showing, only the one chrome window open

- Archive old tabs is and has always been disabled

- Chrome on laptop is only showing the tabs that remain

- No grouped tabs

Where did they all go?!

curious how people here use them. bar only, a pile of folders, or you never bookmark and just use search/history?

i keep saving stuff "for later" and then never opening it lol. if you ever did a big cleanup, did you end up missing anything you deleted

The specific laptop I own is a Lenovo Windows 11 HP.

What happened was, in Settings I found a selection of theme colors, and clicking on one made the empty space above my tabs change color, and made the blue highlight in the search bar a different color too. I found a button that said "Reset to Default", but the blue highlight was still a different color than it originally was (see below: it was a lighter, less bold blue before). So now I don't really know a way to get the blue highlight color and empty-space-above-the-tabs color back to what it looked like when I bought my laptop.

Hi! I have a question.

Does the Chrome Android app not have a 'Read aloud' feature?

After updating Chrome, I can no longer open any PDFs in the built-in viewer. The viewer opens, but the document area turns gray and displays a small sad face icon (see screenshot).

This happens with every PDF I’ve tested, including local files on my computer and publicly accessible PDFs opened directly from websites.

System:

• Windows 11 25H2
• Chrome 156.0.8078.48 (Official Build), 64-bit

What I’ve tried so far:

• Opened PDFs in Guest mode — same problem.
• Disabled PDF Ink2 via chrome://flags/#pdf-ink2 and relaunched — no improvement.
• Disabled graphics acceleration and relaunched — no improvement.
• Checked for updates — Chrome says it’s up to date.

I initially suspected the PDF annotation/drawing features, but disabling PDF Ink2 didn’t help.

chrome://crashes records crashes when this happens. A local inspection of two crash dumps showed the same renderer crash in both: 0xC0000005 in chrome.dll version 156.0.8078.48, at offset 0x43A15DD. One report explicitly lists zero extensions.

Has anyone else experienced this after updating to Chrome 156, particularly on Windows 11? Have you found a fix or a workaround that keeps PDFs opening inside Chrome?

Update: Fixed!

Updating to Chrome 156.0.8078.74 (Official Build, 64-bit) resolved the issue for me. Both local PDFs and PDFs opened directly from websites now load normally, without the gray screen or sad face icon.

Thanks to everyone who helped!

To clarify, I'm not asking for how to fix the problem, as I already found that restarting Google Chrome fixes it. What I want to know is why did this suddenly start earlier this month and then consistently happen over and over multiple times a week? Is there anything I can do to fix the root of the problem instead of just restarting every time?

i dont know what i did but normally the search bar/other windows are always visible and today websites fill the entire screen. How do i make it stop?

Is it possible to put these buttons back on the address bar where they belong?

I closed a window which had 80 tabs almost 24 hours before because my Mac was running slow. I tried to restore that window after the next day and I can't see the restore window or session anymore in the history panel. I had already used a new window and tabs in that but now I can't see that previous session.

Does that mean Google has wiped that off? How do I get it back?

When I click the blue button on the serach, it won‘t come Up, are fixing things dying or something?

i've been going over tons of posts recently about how the "manage tabs" option is mainly gone, but found that with split screening, it comes back.

i used to be able to have multiple windows stored in my account even if not currently running on my phone and it turns out that despite chrome allowing you two or more windows if you split screen, closing one will delete it forever.

i'm frustrated bc this is so counterintuitive!! i've already checked "recently closed tabs" and tried with my laptop but why would the function of the button be changed so drastically?? plus my chrome was occupying like 30gb of storage WHILE not letting me find that window, as in dangling it in my face yk.

luckily i remember what i need open so it's no problem but it's so frustrating.

Okay so I realized I was logged into my school Google account on my personal phone on my own WiFi and I think it’s been like that for a while.

It was strange because it seemed like I wasn’t logged into an account at all because the “sign in” button was available but when I clicked on it I was shown that my school account was my default and I was like kinda signed in? It was showing filtered search on a Google search and that’s the only reason I noticed anything.

My web and app monitoring was off but YouTube was on. I can’t view my search history anyway but maybe they log it somewhere??I don’t know.I don’t really have anything to hid but I feel weird like they can somehow know everything I’ve ever searched.