electron: Electron windows causing repaint issues when DWM composition disabled

Log on to a Windows 7 machine
Switch your theme to Windows Basic or Windows Classic (this has the side-effect of disabling Aero’s DWM composition)
Launch an Electron app
Switch to another app window
The other window fails to repaint:

window repaint issue

This occurs with almost every app that I’ve tried, so it seems like something funky with the Electron window. It may or may not require the presence of a webview tag; I haven’t isolated that yet. Until now we’ve been advising users to switch to an Aero theme (this fixes the problem, but is undesirable for many).

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 9 years ago
Reactions: 1
Comments: 34 (6 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

This is unlikely to be fixed tbh, users should either enable Aero or upgrade to an operating system not old enough to be in grade school

+23

anaisbetts on Jan 30, 2017

It’s odd to get such a glib response as “upgrade to an operating system not old enough to be in grade school” for a product such as this.

I work for a charity and a few banks in the US who still have entirely Windows 7-based infrastructures. Was hoping to use this as an inexpensive dev platform, but will have to reconsider if this response is indicative of the platform support.

BTW, Windows 7 is still huge: http://netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0

Really, I want to work with Electron, but downplaying a major segment of the desktop market, your main objective, seems so frivolous.

sonofachuck on Mar 24, 2017

None of the Electron developers are working on this, but will accept a PR for it

anaisbetts on Aug 26, 2016

@myself248 If you upgrade to any OS newer than Windows 7, you can enable Classic Theme and still not hit this bug. Highly encouraged!

anaisbetts on Feb 12, 2016

I also stumbled on this issue while testing the Electron app we created for our client. As a workaround for the problem, I implemented a function that resizes the window 1 pixel and afterwards setting it back to it’s original dimensions (this can not be seen with the naked eye). Each feature that should repaint the window will also call this function. It’s not the most elegant solution but in the end, it was good enough for us.

Luckily, we only open an existing web application within Electron so we only had to use this hack when changing the title of the window. If you do a lot of native BrowserWindow calls, this may not be the solution for you.

function resizeWindowToFixRepaint(windowToResize) {
	var browserWindow = windowToResize || BrowserWindow.getFocusedWindow();

	var wasMaximized = browserWindow.isMaximized();
	var bounds = browserWindow.getBounds();

	browserWindow.setSize(bounds.width - 1, bounds.height - 1);

	if (wasMaximized) {
		browserWindow.maximize();
	} else {
		browserWindow.setSize(bounds.width, bounds.height);
	}
};

dsteegen on Jul 10, 2017

This is a serious UX issue and I’m disheartened to see such a glib answer from a contributor. Really wish it would get fixed. 😞

thauk-copperleaf on Oct 19, 2017

Considering using Electron for a new project but this issue would be the show stopper as a significant number of our users will have Windows 7.

tohagan on Dec 12, 2016

Are there any Electron developers who can comment on this issue? If this is not going to be fixed, that would be good to know so we can make alternate arrangements.

This has been open for over a year and the issue is fairly serious for the affected users (a not insignificant number of people).

abatkin on Aug 26, 2016