Friday, August 15, 2014

Broken Google Maps Rendering on Chrome on Windows

The other day, I noticed that Google Maps rendering on my Chrome (v 36.0.1985.125) on Windows (7) was so broken, that Google Maps essentially became useless.
Streets/Roads were mostly invisible - looks like the line for the street has been overwritten by the street name:


At the same time it worked fine in Firefox and Internet Explorer (yes, I admit to having IE on my machine, just to test stuff like this).

So some testing and googling ... ok a lot of googling, since "google maps broken chrome" reveals essentially every rant on google maps there ever was...

Finally with some refining of search terms, I found the following hint.
Turns out, in this case you should disable the video hardware acceleration in Chrome.
Just open the settings, then search for "accel", and disable it, i.e. unmark the checkbox, if it is marked.



Restart chrome, and it works fine again: