I often need to take screenshots of various webpages that I browse. For some time I was using the default Mac screenshot-taking ability, but it was not exactly convenient. The major disadvantage was that I was not able to take screenshots of whole web pages (i.e. pages spanning more than one length of a browser’s window). Looking for a solution, I installed and tried several screen capturing Chrome extensions and eventually settled on Awesome Screenshot. There are some reports that it contains adware, but I have not noticed any problems and it has been working great for me. That is until recently.

A while ago all screenshots that I took with the extension would just display a black screen. Reinstalling the extension did not help. Reinstalling Chrome did not help either. Thinking that it was perhaps a bug in the extension or that it stopped working due to a recent Chrome update, I installed a different screenshot extension. (Three or four, actually). Lo and behold, they all had the same problem now. It was driving me nuts. Googling around did not yield any solution either and so for a while I had just given up and booted up Firefox whenever I needed to take a web page screenshot.

But since I use Chrome as my primary browser, this was frustrating. My frustration grew. And grew. And grew. Until I couldn’t take it anymore and decided that I have to find a fix.

Fast-forward to now, skip a large number of expletives and headshakes, and it turns out that the solution is pretty straight-forward:

Go to ‘Chrome > Preferences > Settings > Show Advanced Settings > System’ and make sure you have the ‘Use hardware acceleration when available’ option set to disabled (uncheck the checkbox).

I am still not completely sure why the extension suddenly stopped working as I don’t remember messing around with this option. It’s possible that it got automatically switched on during a Chrome update. Or perhaps I did check it and just don’t remember it. In any case, enjoy your beautiful screenshots.

Update: I now think that Unity Web Player was the possible culprit. I installed it a while back and after I switched off the Chrome hardware acceleration option, it won’t run (as I found out wanting to take a little break and play the wonderful Mini Metro by Dinosaur Polo Club).

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