Bright white flash when opening Chromium Edge

Brass Contributor

This usually if very bothersome at night when Dark Mode is on. Every time when I open Edge there is a bright white flash before the page appears. I have a Core i9 9900k, Asus Maximus XI Extreme Motherboard, Samsung 970 Pro PCIe NVMe SSD, 128GB RAM and a RTX 2080 TI video card. Nothing is overclocked. This is not just EDGE, its all Chromium based browsers. Any idea why this happens and is Microsoft working on this. The experience feels of low quality. 

9 Replies

Hi there, welcome to the Microsoft Tech Community.

This happens because when you open the browser, the browser starts loading itself whatever it needs so a white screen appears before it starts loading a page, for you, it is a flash because your hardware specs are very good to run all those things fast in a fraction of a second.

@TheShaunSaw 

Well it would be nice if they can find a way to have it flash black because when I get the new ASUS 32 inch Swift monitor (coming out later this year) it will be a flash of light that is almost as bight as the sun...lol. It could possibly put someone in to an epileptic seizure.

A splash screen just like the legacy Edge had, would be very helpful in this.

@Deleted @MissyQ can we please consider this? This is very needed feature :sad:

@jesseinsf This is something that I have personally brought up to the team, and we've been working on trying to get this improved. A big part of what is happening (we believe) is that it's only on the initial loading of the browser (or new window), or initial loading of a new tab, and doesn't really appear anywhere else. Is this in line with your experience?

 

If you haven't yet, please submit feedback immediately after experiencing the white flash via the chat icon in the top right of the browser, by holding Alt+Shift+I, or navigating through the . . . menu > Help & feedback > Send feedback. Include all diagnostics, and then let me know when you do. I want to have the team investigate your situation a bit more. Thanks so much for bringing this up!

 

(And thanks to @Rohit Yadav for the tag.)

 

Missy Quarry (she/her/hers)
Community Manager - Microsoft Edge

@MissyQ Thank you so much for such a detailed reply! We feel honoured to have Community managers like you & everyone else on the community. :smile:

Regarding the white flash, it is visible in a number of places:

  1. Launching Browser window 
  2. Launching an app
  3. Shifting a tab to a new window
  4. Returning back to a tab which has been put to sleep. It gives a white flash.

All of these scenarios must be addressed because when working in the night, those flashes are awful.

My suggestion was to replace these flashes with something more logical: Splash Screen. Splash Screen were present in the legacy Edge also, and all of the Microsoft's apps have them, so it seems logical to have them in the browser.

I have submitted feedback many times previously, and will submit it again! 

@MissyQ My apologies for this terrible late reply but, Yes, it is when opening Edge for the first time or when opening in a new window. Or when opening a new window.

RE @MissyQ 

> This is something that I have personally brought up to the team, and we've been working on trying to get this improved. . . . I want to have the team investigate your situation a bit more. Thanks so much for bringing this up!

 

So did they?  Investigate?  And?  What has happened on this in the two years since this post?  I couldn't seem to even find a dev bug ticket on this.   Users have been pleading for a fix since long before 2020.  

 

When the flash happens is well-known by now, but it's especially irritating when Edge is slow to load a new tab/window.  Imagine you're in a dimly lit room, dark mode, and the bright white screen lingers screaming at your eyes while you wait for loading.  I literally have to close my eyes. 

 

Trust me I've tried many many kludges to suppress this over the years . . custom CSS, extensions, much more.  🤷‍

 

@Rohit Yadav Hi, I concur that it happens on a new tab or window. I have a fast machine also, it’s use is for music production mainly and when loading Ableton Live 11 the screen will flash white after waiting for the screen to load. In my experience this only happens when the machine uses large amounts of cpu to load software. Other programs like Fl Studio 20 don’t have this issue. Maybe a load time script could be injected into the code to blacken the screen rather than whiten under these pretense's. It’s very traumatizing to the eyes even in the day time. Thank you for taking a look at the communities suggestions.

Really would like to see a fix for this. I use Dark Mode on Edge and that makes it exceptionally bad. Edge isn't the only browser that suffers from this issue, but it is worse than others because it happens almost every time a new page opens. I've taken to closing my eyes whenever I click any link that opens a new page because of the bright white light,
I've decided to stop using Edge because of this, it's literally painful. Though I have to say, it's pretty funny and also impressive, that a computer program can physically harm the user.