Fix transparent popup problem with Google Chrome on Windows 10 with VMware Workstation Pro - VMware - Tutorials

When you virtualize Windows 10 on VMware Workstation Pro, you will notice that a bug will occur with Google Chrome.
Indeed, in this specific case, when you see that the popup will be transparent (which is due to a graphical bug).

To solve this problem, there are different solutions that you will see in this tutorial.

Note : for this tutorial, we used Windows 10 v2004 x64 (both host and guest operating system), Google Chrome v100.0.4896.75 and VMware Tools v11.3.5.18557794.

Important : according to our tests, this bug seems to have disappeared since version 17 of VMware Workstation Pro.

1. Disable hardware acceleration

As you can see, on Windows 10, when you click on the padlock icon in the address bar of Google Chrome, the popup "appears" in transparency instead of appearing correctly in black on white.

The 1st solution to fix this problem is to disable hardware acceleration of Google Chrome.
To do this, in Google Chrome, go to the "chrome://settings/system" address.
Then, disable the "Use hardware acceleration when available" setting.

Once the "Use hardware acceleration when available" setting is disabled, click on : Relaunch.

Now, hardware acceleration for Google Chrome has been disabled.

Go to a secure website (HTTPS) and click on the small padlock present in the address bar.
As you can see, the popup now displays correctly.

If you access the address "chrome://gpu" from Google Chrome, you will see that hardware acceleration is disabled and that some graphics renderers will therefore be disabled or managed in software (which means an increase in use of the processor instead of using that of the graphics card of the physical PC).

2. Disable 3D acceleration on VMware Workstation Pro

Another less practical option than the previous one is to disable 3D acceleration in the settings of your virtual machine created on VMware Workstation Pro.

Although this technique works, it has 2 disadvantages :

disabling 3D acceleration will disable hardware acceleration for that entire VM instead of just disabling it for Google Chrome
disabling 3D acceleration is only possible when the virtual machine is powered off.

To disable 3D acceleration for your virtual machine, turn off your virtual machine and click : Edit virtual machine settings.

In the "Hardware" tab, go to the "Display" section and uncheck the "Accelerate 3D graphics" box.

Once the "Accelerate 3D graphics" box is unchecked, click OK.

Start your virtual machine with Windows 10 as a guest operating system and you will see that the popup displayed by Google Chrome is displayed correctly.

If you navigate to "chrome://gpu" from Google Chrome, again you will see that hardware acceleration is disabled (unavailable) since 3D acceleration has been disabled in your virtual machine settings.

3. Force Google Chrome to use OpenGL

Another solution to fix this transparent popup problem is to force Google Chrome to use OpenGL.

To do this, access the "chrome://flags/#use-angle" address from Google Chrome and search for the keyword "ANGLE" (via the CTRL+F keyboard shortcut).
For the "Choose ANGLE graphics backend" setting that appears, select : OpenGL.

Then, click on : Relaunch.

Now, the Google Chrome popup is displayed correctly.

However, this solution will also cause hardware acceleration to be disabled for Google Chrome.