UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu Chromium/53.0.2785.143 Chrome/53.0.2785.143 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce the problem:
1. start chrome
2. navigate through some web pages so you have a history to go back through (I used www.bbc.com to record delays between blinks below)
3. click the back button (see image)
4. the UI freezes (incl. the grey square when the button is pressed)
5. the screen blinks (approx. 0.25s) black x5 times with duration between blinks:
        #1. approx. 5.5s
        #2. approx. 6s
        #3. approx. 6s
        #4. approx. 6s
        #5. approx. 1s

6.  the mouse cursor disappears although mouse-over highlighting still occurs if the mouse is moved (chromium tabs, application panel etc.)
6.  use ctrl+alt+f1 then ctrl+alt+f7 to get the mouse cursor back (I'm on TTY7)
7.  click the back button again
8.  the UI freezes again (incl. the grey square when the button is pressed)
9.  the screen blinks black x3 times:
        #1. approx. 5.5s
        #2. approx. 6s
        #3. approx. 1s

10. use ctrl+alt+f1 then ctrl+alt+f7 to get the mouse cursor back again
11. after this Chromium works perfectly.

What is the expected behavior?
1. start chrome
2. navigate through some web pages so you have a history to go back through
3. click the back button
4. Chromium returns to the previous page

What went wrong?
Described in "Steps to reproduce the problem".

In addition, the forward button has the same issue (use alt+right_arrow to go back first so you can go forward)

Did this work before? Yes The problem has occurred in the last 2 or 3 Synaptic Package Manager updates

Chrome version: 53.0.2785.143  Channel: stable
OS Version: Mint 17.3 Rosa 32-bit
Flash Version: Disabled

Once either forward or back has been 'reset' the other is good too.

Using the hotkeys to go backwards or forwards has no issues and doesn't appear to influence use of the buttons (I can go back multiple times with the hotkeys and the issue still occurs when I ht the back button

The issue does not occur on Firefox 50.0

I am using a Dell Inspiron 1520 laptop:
 +  Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     T5250  @ 1.50GHz
 +  System memory: 4GiB            x2 DIMM DDR Synchronous 667 MHz 2GiB
 +  Intel VGA compatible controller     Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller