Waterfox is not Mozilla, so you need to check with them in regards to extensions. https://www.waterfox.net/addons/

You may be able to manually download pre-Webextensions extensions from AMO manually on pages which still show "older versions" links. You might need to look at SeaMonkey or Thunderbird addons, or use an archived old portable version of Firefox (pre 57-ish?). No-Script hosts it's own extensions so you can get that there. Others may do as well, especially those with a website.

In regard to your streaming issues, Safe Mode temporarily disables your extensions. Try disabling an extension and restart Firefox to to see if the issue persists. If it does, try another one. I suggest beginning with the Webroot extension.

crankygoat said

Waterfox is not Mozilla, so you need to check with them in regards to extensions. https://www.waterfox.net/addons/ You may be able to manually download pre-Webextensions extensions from AMO manually on pages which still show "older versions" links. You might need to look at SeaMonkey or Thunderbird addons, or use an archived old portable version of Firefox (pre 57-ish?). No-Script hosts it's own extensions so you can get that there. Others may do as well, especially those with a website.

I am aware. Weirdly enough, their Waterfox help listing brought me here. I'm not sure why, but it did. So I assumed the two share the same help area, if nothing else. I was under the impression that the two programs used similar construction, so I was surprised to see a lack of an adblock or noscript listing when I went onto their own add-on section. Wikipedia also mentions that legacy add-ons and the like are allowed on the browser, so I figured adblock Plus should be there if nothing else.

Which reminds me, what is the difference between Waterfox and Waterfox Classic? Is there one or are they making a reference to something there?

Ah well. Does anyone know what's causing the video playback issues when in fullscreen mode for the sites I mentioned having issues with? It seems like the first third of the top of the screen is suffering from some kind of distortion that looks somewhere between pixelation and screen tearing, while the rest of the video usually plays normally. What's weirder is that this isn't consistent. Sometimes it will occur near the bottom third of the screen, and sometimes it won't happen at all. The only things so far consistent is that a) it happens only in full screen, and b) it only occurs to me when I'm in the browser on those sites. Nothing text based (i.e. Fanfiction.net) has this occur, nor does it occur on my games that are on my system via steam. Even weirder, having a secondary monitor attached causes the playback issue to vanish, as does having a remote repair attempted on it—which I did try to do when this first started— only to return again when the remote connection is shut down or the external monitor is unplugged from the laptop. Again, Waterfox shows no sign of this issue in any form, so far as I can discern.

I have tried to get a picture of the distortions I'm seeing, but when videos are paused, the distortion vanishes, and even trying to do a print screen shot while the video is in motion results in a complete lack of said distortion showing up in the pictures, no matter how hard I try. This just started randomly happening on Monday Night around between 8 and 9 at night. Prior to that it had been working properly. Nothing I do seems to work, and while Waterfox doesn't seem to be suffering from the issue, I'm not sure if reverting to Firefox 71 is worth it since if it doesn't work, that's just time wasted. Any ideas what to do here?

This forum has never supported the Waterfox builds; silly for them to refer you to this forum for support. http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=42 does provide some support for 3rd party / unofficial builds, but that fora doesn't get much traffic these days.

Yes, Waterfox has similar 'construction' to Mozilla Firefox, but the version you posted here with - Waterfox/56.3 - is based upon an older, legacy version of Firefox. The Addons.Mozilla.Org website removed the older, legacy extensions about a year ago. All the extensions offered there are the newer WebExtensions (for Quantum Firefox) as they are known; vs. Legacy for the older extensions.

"Which reminds me, what is the difference between Waterfox and Waterfox Classic? Is there one or are they making a reference to something there?" My guess is that what the Waterfox people consider the difference between Quantum Firefox and Legacy / Classic versions of Firefox (aka Australis).

As far as any issues with Firefox 72, use that version of Firefox please create a new Questions thread, and make sure you give us the information which is requested when you create the new Question thread. My guess is that you have a video driver issue which is causing that video distortion.

Waterfox Community Support :

https://www.reddit.com/r/waterfox/

Marc7 said

crankygoat said

Waterfox is not Mozilla, so you need to check with them in regards to extensions. https://www.waterfox.net/addons/ You may be able to manually download pre-Webextensions extensions from AMO manually on pages which still show "older versions" links. You might need to look at SeaMonkey or Thunderbird addons, or use an archived old portable version of Firefox (pre 57-ish?). No-Script hosts it's own extensions so you can get that there. Others may do as well, especially those with a website.

I am aware. Weirdly enough, their Waterfox help listing brought me here. I'm not sure why, but it did. So I assumed the two share the same help area, if nothing else. I was under the impression that the two programs used similar construction, so I was surprised to see a lack of an adblock or noscript listing when I went onto their own add-on section. Wikipedia also mentions that legacy add-ons and the like are allowed on the browser, so I figured adblock Plus should be there if nothing else.

Which reminds me, what is the difference between Waterfox and Waterfox Classic? Is there one or are they making a reference to something there?

Ah well. Does anyone know what's causing the video playback issues when in fullscreen mode for the sites I mentioned having issues with? It seems like the first third of the top of the screen is suffering from some kind of distortion that looks somewhere between pixelation and screen tearing, while the rest of the video usually plays normally. What's weirder is that this isn't consistent. Sometimes it will occur near the bottom third of the screen, and sometimes it won't happen at all. The only things so far consistent is that a) it happens only in full screen, and b) it only occurs to me when I'm in the browser on those sites. Nothing text based (i.e. Fanfiction.net) has this occur, nor does it occur on my games that are on my system via steam. Even weirder, having a secondary monitor attached causes the playback issue to vanish, as does having a remote repair attempted on it—which I did try to do when this first started— only to return again when the remote connection is shut down or the external monitor is unplugged from the laptop. Again, Waterfox shows no sign of this issue in any form, so far as I can discern.

I have tried to get a picture of the distortions I'm seeing, but when videos are paused, the distortion vanishes, and even trying to do a print screen shot while the video is in motion results in a complete lack of said distortion showing up in the pictures, no matter how hard I try. This just started randomly happening on Monday Night around between 8 and 9 at night. Prior to that it had been working properly. Nothing I do seems to work, and while Waterfox doesn't seem to be suffering from the issue, I'm not sure if reverting to Firefox 71 is worth it since if it doesn't work, that's just time wasted. Any ideas what to do here?

I would have thought so too, but I just updated my drivers, so that shouldn't be the case. And in fact the issue didn't start till a few days after I had installed the new drivers.

RobertJ said

In regard to your streaming issues, Safe Mode temporarily disables your extensions. Try disabling an extension and restart Firefox to to see if the issue persists. If it does, try another one. I suggest beginning with the Webroot extension.

Hmm. I could try it. I'm assuming that doing a disable and reenable would be like 'refreshing' the extension, so that it would work as it should again?

In your original question you said - Though curiously, running the browser in safe mode seems to remove those issues. Safe Mode disables extensions and prevents them from running. You need to disable an extension and restart Firefox to duplicate what Safe Mode did.

RobertJ said

In your original question you said - Though curiously, running the browser in safe mode seems to remove those issues. Safe Mode disables extensions and prevents them from running. You need to disable an extension and restart Firefox to duplicate what Safe Mode did.

Yeah, I just tried that. No luck. Interestingly enough, Safe mode never disabled the webroot extension. At least not that I recall.

OK Another thing that Safe Mode does is disable Hardware Acceleration so, it could be Hardware Acceleration. Check this article: How to disable Hardware Acceleration

RobertJ said

OK Another thing that Safe Mode does is disable Hardware Acceleration so, it could be Hardware Acceleration. Check this article: How to disable Hardware Acceleration

Huh. Curiously enough that appears to have worked. I'm not sure why, but it seems to have fixed the playback issues. It now looks effectively identical to how it used to before, if slightly a bit grainier on netflix but I can live with that. If hardware acceleration isn't required, then I can leave it off, I would assume? I dunno if it worked because I told Firefox not to restore the previous session when I restarted this time or not. But if that is the cure for my issue, Then I'm happy about that. Uhm, would this be something I should check again next time a graphics card driver update goes through? This was very random that it should happen a few days after I updated the drivers rather than the day of. I dunno if that means that the drivers caused a glitch in the browser that affects hardware acceleration or something else. But I would assume I should leave Hardware acceleration either off or change the content process limit under the hardware acceleration thing?

If you had a "glitch" in your graphics driver I'm sure that you would notice it elsewhere. You can check again for driver updates but, you should be OK. I would leave the Hardware Acceleration off until the next driver update then, try it again and see how it works. I don't recommend changing the content process limit. The multi-process architecture actually helps prevent crashes along with other performance benefits.

I'm glad we found the cause of your problem.

Good luck with the Waterfox forum.

Browse Safe!

RobertJ said

If you had a "glitch" in your graphics driver I'm sure that you would notice it elsewhere. You can check again for driver updates but, you should be OK. I would leave the Hardware Acceleration off until the next driver update then, try it again and see how it works. I don't recommend changing the content process limit. The multi-process architecture actually helps prevent crashes along with other performance benefits. I'm glad we found the cause of your problem. Good luck with the Waterfox forum. Browse Safe!

Ok, cool. My biggest issue was just why that distortion was happening and why it took so long to happen if it was a driver update issue. In any case, aside from playback being a little less sharp on lower resolution videos, which is a small price to pay, this appears to be fixed, and hopefully it will remain that way. I will check out the hardware acceleration thing on my next driver update for my graphics card, and maybe it'll go back to normal.

The content limit appears to be set to 8 by default, so I am just gonna leave that alone, as I doubt increasing it would do me any favors right now. Hopefully the next driver update...or maybe even the next version of Firefox will not have this issue. Incidentally, is Firefox still compatible with the NVidia GeForce GTX 965m? That's the card I have and up till Monday I'd never had any issues with the browser, so maybe that's why Hardware acceleration needed to be turned off?

In any case, thanks for the help. I may still look into Waterfox's help forums to see about their extensions and the like. But as Firefox's issues appear to be solved, I'm just gonna stick with Firefox as I don't need to worry about Waterfox at this stage. Like I said before, when I clicked on Waterfox Help, it just brought me here. Not sure why.

Thanks again, and let's hope this solution sticks!

Regarding your question about the NVidia GeForce GTX 965m graphics card - it's my understanding that the NVidia cards have enough muscle to handle all of the graphics that you would encounter on the web without needing any hardware acceleration. As a matter of fact, one of the cards has so much muscle that NVidia had to create a utility to cut down on the number of cores. I don't think that you are going to be needing any hardware acceleration anytime soon.

RobertJ said

Regarding your question about the NVidia GeForce GTX 965m graphics card - it's my understanding that the NVidia cards have enough muscle to handle all of the graphics that you would encounter on the web without needing any hardware acceleration. As a matter of fact, one of the cards has so much muscle that NVidia had to create a utility to cut down on the number of cores. I don't think that you are going to be needing any hardware acceleration anytime soon.

That's a plus. Though I've now noticed that I see a similar distortion on pictures in email rather than on video here on Firefox. That's strange, but as long as it's only in my emails, I can live with that. So yeah, this is probably just one weird as hell glitch that's affecting different parts of Firefox when different things are turned on or off. Cause I double checked and again, the distortion isn't on Waterfox in my emails. So guess we'll have to see what the next updates bring.

Thanks again for the info and all the help. :)