Screen tearing/flicker

[Odaeus]

I've also been seeing a lot of flicker for the past few weeks. I was on Catalina until upgrading to Big Sur a week ago. It happens whenever there's high CPU usage from Vivaldi or other applications. The entire window seems to flicker, not just the page.

Mac OS 11.4 / Vivaldi 4.0.2312.27
MacBook Pro 13" 2020

[AbstractAlgorithm]

This has been progressively getting worse and worse for some reason.

I've seen pages rendered like some badly decoded video frames - blocks of page rasterised in places where they shouldn't be, or blank page.

Scrolling is really sluggish.

Both the parts of the Vivaldi's UI flicker, and the parts of the page itself.

Opening DevTools feels like a Herculean effort.

The latest encounter was where I lost control of the browser, it was just flickering and switching between two tabs, on its own, not responding to any input.

For the previous few days (since I first wrote here), I was testing Chrome and Brave as alternatives for a few hours per day - they don't have any of the mentioned issues. This leads me to a safe conclusion that it's not the hardware of my machine or any of the extensions, but the browser itself.

Currently, Vivaldi is not usable for me anymore and I will be switching to some alternative until I see fixes regarding these things in the changelog.

[ImaginaryFreedom]

I wonder if all the HTML/CSS/etc that Vivaldi adds to the base Chromium code to customize the UI "shell" around Chromium is responsible for that.

I wonder if they can isolate the UI "shell" from the "active content renderer" into a completely separate process, and if that would help.

[jjaarreekk]

Vivaldi is great productivity-wise but the flicker/clipping makes it's almost impossible to use sometimes.

I recorded how it looks for me, and recording is showing this in very little scale, I mean, for me it's usually much more intensive, tends to be worse with more tabs open.

Recording on YT

Vivaldi version 4.0.2312.38 (Stable channel) (arm64)

Laptop

[Chas4]

Side note Apple is close to releasing macOS 11.5

For this with tearing is it any different with hardware acceleration on and off?

[jjaarreekk]

@chas4 Disabling hardware acceleration fixes it. Any chance this will be fixed for good soon?

[Chas4]

@jjaarreekk Should get fixed, have you make a bug report yet with what you have found?

[Chas4]

There is a recent Vivaldi update https://vivaldi.com/blog/desktop/minor-update-6-for-desktop-4-0/ with just a Chromium update (with security fixes) not sure if that will improve anything but can try.

[SaiBork]

I have the same issue with the flickering tabs on Windows, no mac involved. Latest update has not fixed it.

Current workarounds for me (each one is separate and dont need to combine them).

• Disable hardware acceleration in Vivaldi (or Windows completely)
• Set all monitors to 60 Hz
• Change Windows background image from an image or slideshow to a solid colour

[Chas4]

@saibork Might need to install Microsoft Updates (in the optional updates there might be a GPU driver update)

[SaiBork]

@chas4 There are no GPU updates, I've tried the last several drivers for GPU and they all have it.

[duartevasco]

I see the same behavior in

This most noticeable in YouTube, but I see it occasionally elseshwere as well

[aashish108]

I have also started seeing severe flickering on any page. Looks like a bug, not sure what to do? I enabled hardware acceleration to fix another issue lol.

Vivaldi 4.3.2439.63 (Stable channel) (x86_64)
Revision 9cb975dce5136de3370122fff19def18adbbb755
OS macOS Version 11.5.1 (Build 20G80)
JavaScript V8 9.4.146.24
User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/94.0.4606.114 Safari/537.36
Command Line /Applications/Vivaldi.app/Contents/MacOS/Vivaldi --flag-switches-begin --flag-switches-end --disable-smooth-scrolling --save-page-as-mhtml
Executable Path /Applications/Vivaldi.app/Contents/MacOS/Vivaldi
Profile Path /Users/aashishs/Library/Application Support/Vivaldi/Profile 1
Linker ld

Hardware Overview:

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro16,2
Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Core i5
Processor Speed: 2 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per Core): 512 KB
L3 Cache: 6 MB
Hyper-Threading Technology: Enabled
Memory: 32 GB
System Firmware Version: 1554.140.20.0.0 (iBridge: 18.16.14759.0.1,0)
Serial Number (system): C02G74QJML85
Hardware UUID: 5AB0AD1C-AFA5-5692-B009-6892D5933A0C
Provisioning UDID: 5AB0AD1C-AFA5-5692-B009-6892D5933A0C
Activation Lock Status: Disabled