spotify-cef-noframe

Remove Spotify's ugly white "Spotify Premium" title bar on Wayland tiling WMs (niri / Sway / Hyprland / river / …) — no Flatpak, no Snap, no patched binary, no Spicetify.

A ~40-line LD_PRELOAD shim that forces Spotify's CEF window to be frameless, the way it was before the regression.

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The problem

Recent Spotify desktop builds create their main window through Chromium Embedded Framework's Views API. On a compositor that doesn't give the client server-side decorations (which is every tiling Wayland WM), CEF draws its own generic, unthemed white title bar showing Spotify Premium and a lone close button — floating above Spotify's normal dark UI.

It appeared "after an update" for a lot of people and is widely reported (Spotify Community, Arch forums, r/spotify, r/hyprland, …). Spotify has acknowledged it; there is no upstream fix yet.

Why the usual advice doesn't work

Every layer people normally reach for was ruled out by inspection (CEF remote-debugging screenshot of the DOM, nm/ldd on the binary, runtime delegate-size validation):

Fix people suggest	Why it can't work here
Spicetify / custom CSS	The bar is not in the xpui DOM — proved via CDP screenshot
gtk3-nocsd, GTK_CSD=0	Main window is a CEF Views window, not a GtkWindow
--ozone-platform=x11, unset WAYLAND_DISPLAY, disable Ozone	Bar persists under pure XWayland too
GTK theme / adw-gtk3-dark	It's not GTK-themed chrome
Downgrade / flatpak / snap	Regression spans deb, snap and flatpak

The bar is drawn by Spotify's bundled Chromium browser process itself. Nothing in normal userland can reach it… except the CEF C API boundary.

How this works

Spotify calls the stable, exported CEF C API:

cef_window_t* cef_window_create_top_level(cef_window_delegate_t* delegate);

CEF draws the frame because the delegate's is_frameless() callback returns false. This shim interposes that one exported symbol, flips two callbacks in the delegate the app passes —

• is_frameless() → 1
• with_standard_window_buttons() → 0

— then forwards to the real libcef function. CEF then creates a frameless window. Spotify already ships its own draggable region (.body-drag-top), so everything (dragging, resizing, its own controls) keeps working.

No binary is modified. It's pure runtime interposition of a documented ABI, trivially reversible, and survives Spotify updates as long as the CEF major version (struct layout) doesn't change.

Offsets

cef_window_delegate_t flattened layout (x86-64, 8-byte pointers):

cef_base_ref_counted_t        40   (size_t size + 4 fn ptrs)
CefViewDelegate   11 methods  +88
CefPanelDelegate   0 methods   +0
CefWindowDelegate: is_frameless = method #11 (10 before it)  +80
  => is_frameless                 @ 208
  => with_standard_window_buttons @ 216

Defaults target CEF branch 7559 (chromium-144.0.7559) — what Spotify shipped at time of writing. The shim validates the delegate's self-reported size at runtime before touching memory, so a layout mismatch fails safe (no patch, no crash) rather than corrupting anything.

Requirements

• A native Spotify install (AUR spotify, official .deb, spotify-launcher).
• A C compiler (gcc/clang), bash.
• x86-64. (Other arches: pointer size assumptions still hold at 8 bytes on 64-bit; offsets are the same.)

Install

git clone <your-repo-url> spotify-cef-noframe
cd spotify-cef-noframe
./install.sh

Then fully quit Spotify and relaunch it from your app launcher:

pkill -f spotify

That's it. install.sh builds ~/.local/lib/cef-noframe.so and writes a per-user ~/.local/share/applications/spotify.desktop (derived from your system one) that preloads it. The system install is left untouched.

Uninstall

./uninstall.sh

Launching from a terminal

The per-user .desktop only applies to launcher/menu launches. For a bare terminal spotify, either:

LD_PRELOAD=~/.local/lib/cef-noframe.so spotify

or add an alias:

# bash/zsh
alias spotify='LD_PRELOAD=$HOME/.local/lib/cef-noframe.so spotify'
# fish
alias spotify 'env LD_PRELOAD=$HOME/.local/lib/cef-noframe.so spotify'

Troubleshooting

Run with logging:

CEF_NOFRAME_DEBUG=1 LD_PRELOAD=~/.local/lib/cef-noframe.so spotify 2>&1 | grep cef-noframe

• frameless forced (delegate size=312, …) → working. 312 is the expected size for chromium-144.0.7559; a different number means a different CEF.
• SKIP: delegate size=… < required … → offsets don't match your CEF version. See below.

A/B test instantly without uninstalling: CEF_NOFRAME_DISABLE=1.

Recomputing offsets for a new CEF version

If a Spotify update brings the bar back, the CEF major version likely changed the delegate struct layout. You don't need to recompile to experiment — override at runtime:

CEF_NOFRAME_DEBUG=1 CEF_NOFRAME_OFFSET=<n> CEF_NOFRAME_BTNS_OFFSET=<n+8> \
  LD_PRELOAD=~/.local/lib/cef-noframe.so spotify

To derive <n> precisely:

1. strings /opt/spotify/libcef.so | grep -oE 'chromium-[0-9.]+' → note the chromium build, e.g. chromium-1XY.0.ABCD.
2. The matching CEF git branch on https://github.com/chromiumembedded/cef is the chromium build number (ABCD).
3. From that branch read include/views/cef_view_delegate.h and include/views/cef_window_delegate.h. The generated C API keeps the exact declaration order of the virtual methods.
4. `offset(is_frameless) = 40 + (CefViewDelegate method count)*8
   • (CefPanelDelegate method count)*8 + (index of IsFrameless among CefWindowDelegate methods)*8. (40 = cef_base_ref_counted_t; CefPanelDelegate` has historically had 0 methods.)
5. Put the number in CEF_NOFRAME_OFFSET (and +8 in CEF_NOFRAME_BTNS_OFFSET), or edit the defaults in src/cef_noframe.c and re-run ./install.sh.

PRs with a verified offset table per CEF version are very welcome.

FAQ

Is this safe? It only ever writes two function pointers into a struct the app itself allocated, and only after checking the struct's self-reported size. Worst realistic case on a bad offset is Spotify not starting — remove LD_PRELOAD and you're back to stock.

Does it touch the Spotify binary? No. Nothing on disk in the Spotify install is modified.

Flatpak/Snap? LD_PRELOAD doesn't cross the Flatpak sandbox the same way; this targets native installs (the whole point is avoiding Flatpak). Snap may work if the snap can see the .so path — untested.

Will updates break it? Spotify app updates: fine. A CEF major bump: recompute the offset (above). The runtime size-check makes a mismatch fail safe, not crash.

Credits

Diagnosed and built by Alphawk, with Claude (Anthropic) doing the deep CEF/CDP spelunking. Born from one very stubborn white bar on niri.

If this saved your sanity, share it with the next person rage-googling "spotify white title bar wayland".

License

MIT — see LICENSE.