Making youtube fullscreen will freeze Unity (the whole desktop)

I never had this problem until today. When I watch a youtube video everything is fine, until I make the video fullscreen. It actually continues to play perfectly when fullscreen, but when I then exit fullscreen my sidebar and topbar are gone, and the screen is just frozen. Also my cursor is gone. It does seem to respond to ALT-F4, but it takes about 15 seconds to even close the window, and after that everything is unusable (basically frozen). What's strange though, when I re-enter fullscreen after exiting (and unity being frozen) the video plays perfectly still.

For now my workaround is opening tty1 and executing pkill -u username which logs off the user. I have looked at /var/log/syslog but it seems to be empty.

Is this freezing a common problem, if not, how can I make steps to fix this?

EDIT with specs:

I'm on a simple Samsung laptop with: Ubuntu 14.10 64-bit, Intel® Core™ i5-3210M, Intel® Ivybridge Mobile (So integrated intel hd graphics 4000), 8GB ram. I don't think i've ever changed my video drivers, but it's reported as i915. Ubuntu is up to date, and my browser is Chrome 40.0.2214.91 (64-bit). (Will test out now with firefox, but already posting this because my pc might freeze again)

EDIT 2: It doesn't freeze on Firefox. Will try reinstalling chrome now... EDIT 3: Reinstalling chrome didn't help. Will try chrome 32-bit too now...

Solution 1:

It seems like the problem reappeared with Chrome version 49. Below is a workaround that will solve the problem until Chrome fixes this bug. It works without disabling hardware acceleration in Chrome (and potentially causing other issues).

1. If compizconfig-settings-manager is not installed, install it by

   sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

2. Launch compizconfig-settings-manager by typing ccsm from the terminal

3. Double click to open the Composite plugin

4. Add & !(class=google-chrome) at the end of the Unredirect Match text box (see screenshot below).

   

5. Close the settings manager.

6. Be scared no more to click on Full Screen!

Source: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=550091#c43

Solution 2:

I tried upgrading to

40.0.2214.93

It does not help much. after a while the problem start again, as it is mentioned by other users above.

The one worked for me is this - disable the hardware acceleration settings. in google chrome. For disabling hardware acceleration - go to the option "customize and control google chrome" the gray area in upper right corner besides the option of Google input tools-

Then click on settings from the drop down menu. click on the blue option

Show advanced settings...

check for the 16th category -

System

and see if the box for using hardware acceleration is checked

if it is checked please uncheck it.

This has solved my problem.

Solution 3:

Got the same issue ever after the Chrome 40.0.2214.91 release, and though I haven't tried the .93, I can at least confirm the issue is 100% gone in Chrome 41 Beta.

Strongly considering sticking to the beta until 41 becomes stable, or at least until it's 100% confirmed a point release fixed the issue.

Solution 4:

Chrome 40.0.2214.93-1 was released and the problem seems to be gone much better now. Similar symptoms still occur some times but much less frequently. It seems that this problem only affected started with the 40.0.2214.91-1 release. So if you're running that version do sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade to update to a more current version.