A Sledgehammer For Chrome

I upgraded Chrome in my VM, to version 19.0.1084.46.

Which, apparently, forces use of the GPU Process task.

And, in a nice lovely screw you from the kind folks at Google, there's no way to disable this.

The end result is having the VM slow to a crawl (2 second pause between mouse movements, ignored clicks, etc...).  Fixable by the agony of getting to the task manager and killing the GPU process by hand, and then, doing it again when it restarts.

My naive effort was to use Chrome's commandline switches... none of which solved it, and I eventually got to where I ran out of room in the shortcut target, and then in the Windows run dialog.  So, I found myself with this on a commandline:

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application=>chrome --disable-webgl --disable-accelerated-2d-canvas --disable-accelerated-layers --disable-accelerated-plugins --disable-accelerated-video --blacklist-webgl --disable-threaded-compositing --disable-gl-multisampling --disable-threaded-animation --disable-accelerated-compositing --blacklist-accelerated-compositing --disable-accelerated-painting --disable-accelerated-filters --disable-3d-apis 

And, still, chrome://gpu-internals happily showed everything (and I mean everything, except the CSS bit) disabled... and yet, still it started.

So much for a big hammer.

But, ... a kludge was found... using --gpu-startup-dialog.  This pops up a window (with only 'ok'), but since it doesn't switch modes, it's easy to kill the GPU Process in the task manager.

However, the final solution to running the broken, retarded, I-loved-this-browser-why'd-they-have-to-ruin-it Chrome version in a VM?

--gpu-launcher=pieceofshit

Using that, I didn't even have to do any of the other disabling; in a VM, leaving everything accelerated, the GPU Process never starts, everything's smooth, and fast, just the way it should be. (I'm assuming it works because by passing the launcher garbage, it bails instead of trying to keep going. Hopefully this 'feature' doesn't get fixed.)

Reference:
Chrome Commandline Switches