Windows – Chrome window changes color depending on which monitor it’s open

colorsgoogle-chromemultiple-monitorswindowswindows 10

After an update Chrome treats its windows differently depending on which monitor the window is running. Instead of explaining what I mean, I'll show a screenshot of two Chrome windows open side by side on both monitors:

Chrome madness

This isn't a stitched screenshot, it is a single screenshot of the whole virtual desktop. As you can see, the window on the left is more reddish, and it's not just the content that has its color changed, but the whole window – all of the controls. If more than 50% of the window gets dragged on to the main (right) monitor, the window automatically readjusts its color to default, which is how I found out that it's not a monitor issue.

I don't know what to blame because few hours prior there was a Windows update too. I have never tinkered with color profiles and made sure that all of the settings in Windows are default.

Chrome version: Official build 68.0.3440.75 x64
Windows version: Windows 10 1803 (17134.191) x64

Best Answer

There are multiple solutions for this problem. I've gathered a list here:

  • Check if the chrome://flags/#force-color-profile setting is set to Default, if not, setting to sRGB is one way to fix it.
  • Check Color Profiles in Windows settings. This was the culprit for me. The second monitor had "Natural Color Pro" color profile enabled by default, I overrode this setting and removed the profile.
  • Another fix is having Hardware acceleration disabled. You should use this if none of the above works, because the performance loss is significant on low-end machines.

Thanks to @leonbloy for linking the Reddit thread that had the first two solutions.
Thanks to @Thomas B. SysAdmin for recommending disabling hardware acceleration.

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