How to troubleshoot a white screen in Mist browser?

Question

I keep running into issues with white or black screens showing up after installing the mist browser or the ethereum wallet.

How to troubleshoot a blank screen in the wallet or browser?

Answer 1

Missing dependencies?

First of all try installing meteorjs and electron. These dependencies should be included in the binaries but some operating systems behave weird.

Is your GPU blacklisted?

Try to run mist or ethereum-wallet with the --ignore-gpu-blacklist flag. This might cause the client to crash. But if it does not crash, you probably run a working wallet by now.

Issues with links to blank pages?

Use this script to fix all wallet addresses to lower case.

// Open the wallet console: Menu -> Develop -> Toggle console ...
// Run the following script

_.each(Wallets.find().fetch(), function(item){
    if(item.address)
        Wallets.update(item._id, {$set: {address: item.address.toLowerCase()}}); 
});
_.each(CustomContracts.find().fetch(), function(item){
    if(item.address)
        CustomContracts.update(item._id, {$set: {address: item.address.toLowerCase()}}); 
});
_.each(Tokens.find().fetch(), function(item){
    if(item.address)
        Tokens.update(item._id, {$set: {address: item.address.toLowerCase()}}); 
});

This changes all your wallet addresses internally back to lowercase (it was introduced that by accident).

Answer 2

If you are still having issues try to install the previous version of the wallet. Once you do this install it on your machine then go ahead and download the new version again.

That solved the white screen issue for me thanks to a buddy of mine. Hope it helps!

Answer 3

Another way is to debug to with chrome dev-tools

Answer 4

I found the white screen to appear very consistently when I switched between testnet and mainnet, but only if the dev-tools console was on. If I switched from mainnet to testnet while the console was open--white screen. If I switched from testnet-mainnet while console was open--white screen. Any other time I switched --no white screen.

In fact, the only time I've ever seen the white screen is when I switched chains with the console open.