Among the search results for chrome white flash is a solution that fixed the problem in 2013 but doesn't work any more. It seems like at one point you were able to control that empty white space with javascript+css.. but something changed so using an extension to fix it won't work from what I can tell.
The most reasonable seeming 'fix' would be to simply remain on the current page and not make visible the destination page until at least the background of the destination page has been loaded.. as to not rely on some default color serving in the in-between state.
It would be nice if this issue could be fixed at the source level without some kind of band-aid fix. I'm not familiar with the Chromium source code and assume if this was a trivial enough issue it would have been fixed by now by someone who knows what theyre doing.. but who knows. I decided to just do something to rectify it on my computer in the mean time. This might be helpful for anyone who is looking for simply anything to get rid of the white-flashing.
You will need Autohotkey and these two images:
.. saved to the desktop. (Important that they are saved to the desktop)
For x86 systems, you will need a copy of Gdip.ahk also saved to the desktop.
For x64 systems, you will need the x64 version of Gdip_All.ahk -- save this file to the desktop as Gdip.ahk.
Save this script: noflashing.ahk to the desktop.
After you have installed autohotkey and saved everything to the desktop.. right click the noflashing.ahk file and click 'Run script' .
Note: If you are using a custom theme for chrome - or running chrome in Incognito mode - autohotkey won't be able to find the 'reload' and 'stop' buttons because they are styled differently. Try running the script without any theme activated and see if you are still having troubles
Any time you press enter, click, or navigate between tabs, the script will immediately look to see if the page has entered a 'loading' state (when the 'reload' icon turns into 'stop') and if it does, it will paint the contents of the window in-place, until the 'reload' symbol appears, indicating the new page has been loaded (or 3 seconds have passed, whichever comes first.) . then the painted window will hide and it shouldn't have even been noticible that anything happened at all. It generally works pretty seamless, although it isnt 100% perfect if the target page doesnt load quickly enough, but that can be fixed in the script if desired.
Here is a comparison of navigating between tabs before and after using the noflashing.ahk script.
