Use Skia Graphite on Chromium to workaround GL issues

[newperson1746]

The GL issues are infamous at this point, but Chromium has been for many years working on their new Skia Graphite renderer since their old backend for Skia (their graphics abstraction library) called Ganesh was not only GL dependent but full of code cruft and incompatible with modern API optimizations like Vulkan and Metal

They've deployed that new backend to ARM Macs to fanfare: https://blog.chromium.org/2025/07/introducing-skia-graphite-chromes.html (background)

However it is complete enough to enable on Intel/AMD64:

/Applications/Chromium.app/Contents/MacOS/Chromium --enable-skia-graphite --skia-graphite-backend=metal --enable-features=UseSkiaGraphite,SkiaGraphitePrecompilation --disable-features=UseSkiaRenderer --use-angle=metal

(Downloading Chromium from the latest trunk build for testing: https://download-chromium.appspot.com/?platform=Mac&type=snapshots (select Mac-Intel at the bottom)

This produces a fully usable Chromium, including WebGL (converted to Metal by way of ANGLE conveniently!) completely eliminating OpenGL and producing a wonderful user experience. Electron apps using recent builds of Chromium code should also accept these flags, but untested.

Screenshots:

[newperson1746]

After using this for a half hour, it's far more responsive than Safari which still ends up lagging during heavy compute activity. This is definitely the best browser workaround to use in my opinion on Vega iGPUs

[newperson1746]

Unfortunately both Discord and VS Code don't have it yet:

[6431:1022/135811.005585:ERROR:gpu/command_buffer/service/service_utils.cc:337] Skia Graphite backend = "metal" not found - falling back to Ganesh!

Since the chromium CI configuration seen in the appspot build is explicitly intended to be bleeding edge and for testing, they include Skia Graphite, while even VSCode with Electron 37 doesn't have it since Electron is moer production oriented. So unfortunately the downstream builds probably won't include Skia Graphite until Chrome deems it ready as a default on Intel Macs

[VisualEhrmanntraut]

Hello - Thanks for this wonderful finding. I will keep in mind to add this to the FAQ section.