Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

FF on w8.1 32bit renders black pages

more options

i reverted from w10 to 8.1 for reliability reasons. (start and taskbar would stop working.) now that i'm back to 8.1 i have a problem i didn't used to have before i upgrade to 10. most of the times, the pages i have open or will open, will render black. refreshing won't help, neither clearing the cache. i must exit the browser and open it again for it to load them correctly. this is an example, it happens on every website.

the OS rollback was from a complete clean installation. i didn't use the rollback feature in w10. also i created the FF profile from the beginning.

i reverted from w10 to 8.1 for reliability reasons. (start and taskbar would stop working.) now that i'm back to 8.1 i have a problem i didn't used to have before i upgrade to 10. most of the times, the pages i have open or will open, will render black. refreshing won't help, neither clearing the cache. i must exit the browser and open it again for it to load them correctly. this is an example, it happens on every website. the OS rollback was from a complete clean installation. i didn't use the rollback feature in w10. also i created the FF profile from the beginning.
Priloženi snimci ekrana

All Replies (9)

more options

Usually odd display glitches are associated with an incompatibility with your graphics card (or chipset) driver software. A common way to assess whether that is the issue is to disable Firefox from using hardware acceleration. You can do that on the Options page:

"3-bar" menu button (or Tools menu) > Options

In the left column, click Advanced. On the right side, with the "General" mini-tab active, uncheck the box for "Use hardware acceleration when available".

This takes effect the next time you exit Firefox and start it up again. Any difference?

Since hardware acceleration improves the appearance of fonts and animations, you may want to check whether graphics card/chipset driver updates are available for your system. This article suggests safe ways to do that: Upgrade your graphics drivers to use hardware acceleration and WebGL.

more options

i have a nvidia gt-240 Version: 341.95 WHQL Release Date: 2016.3.16

this is the latest driver. i will try with hardware acceleration disabled and post any results. will this have any impact on page loading,rendering etc.?

more options

pavilion_alex said

i will try with hardware acceleration disabled and post any results. will this have any impact on page loading,rendering etc.?

It will affect the quality of web font rendering (anti-aliasing) and may affect WebGL applications like Google Maps. Not sure of any other effects.

more options

i disabled H.A, and i can say that everything rolled smoothly. however i noticed a drop in the quality of youtube videos for example.

it wasn't as smooth as before (it's obvious with disabled H.A).

i re-enabled it.

more options

Could you try disabling the "off main thread composition" (OMTC) feature introduced in Firefox 33? Please keep hardware accelerated enabled while disabling OMTC. The steps are as follows:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Click the button promising to be careful.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste layers and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled preference to switch it from true to false

I can't recall whether that takes effect immediately or only after you exit Firefox and start it up again (since I don't have the symptoms to test with).

more options

i tried it, i didn't notice any black rendering. however it slowed down the browser a bit, like when i was grabbing the scroll bar and dragging up and down, it would flash the min/max/close buttons and other minus stuff, or a bit slowed down videos.

that is all.

more options

Yes, that makes sense. The idea behind OMTC was to separate two aspects of screen painting to improve performance. Unfortunately, with some Nvidia cards, this seems to cause the blackout. Hopefully another volunteer will come up with a suggestion that better resolves the issue.

more options

my card is a gt-240. i think it's from 2009-2010 thank you for your time.

Izmjenjeno od strane user258952873857570727496676336801149933546

more options

update: i removed the latest graphics driver, and i installed a much older version from 2/2015. it seems that it reduced the problem to 99%, however there are black spots every now and then but most can be solved by refreshing the page or minimizing/maximizing the window.

i guess it must be a combination of graphic driver and the recent changes in FF.