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Scrolling is painful and erratic!

  • 8 replies
  • 38 have this problem
  • 10 views
  • Last reply by dinodon

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When I scroll a page, there is an inconsistent delay in the response.

I am running Firefox 27.0.1 on a brand new Windows 8.1 machine. Scrolling on the touchpad or with a mouse wheel will usually (but sometimes not) give a delay or a jump to the new page position. When I use the touchscreen to scroll, there is no issue.

I have tried many, many things to fix: "restart with add-ons disabled," periodically closing firefox to clear out the memory, unchecking smooth scrolling option, about:config options (mousewheel.pixel, general.smoothscrool.mousewheel.durationmaxms/minms, etc), and "reset firefox" to make sure I didn't tweak too many things. I've checked other browsers while firefox is having this issue--the other browsers IE and Chrome don't have this problem.

Please help! I really rather use ff than another browser. But the scrolling is bad enough to make me ready to leave ff.

When I scroll a page, there is an inconsistent delay in the response. I am running Firefox 27.0.1 on a brand new Windows 8.1 machine. Scrolling on the touchpad or with a mouse wheel will usually (but sometimes not) give a delay or a jump to the new page position. When I use the touchscreen to scroll, there is no issue. I have tried many, many things to fix: "restart with add-ons disabled," periodically closing firefox to clear out the memory, unchecking smooth scrolling option, about:config options (mousewheel.pixel, general.smoothscrool.mousewheel.durationmaxms/minms, etc), and "reset firefox" to make sure I didn't tweak too many things. I've checked other browsers while firefox is having this issue--the other browsers IE and Chrome don't have this problem. Please help! I really rather use ff than another browser. But the scrolling is bad enough to make me ready to leave ff.

All Replies (8)

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Did you try to disable hardware acceleration in Firefox?

Try to disable hardware acceleration in Firefox (you need to close and restart Firefox).

  • Tools > Options > Advanced > General > Browsing: "Use hardware acceleration when available"
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Yes, I did try to disable hardware acceleration + restart, to no avail.

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Try to increase the value of the general.smoothScroll.mouseWheel.durationMaxMS pref on the about:config page a higher value like 1000 to see if that makes a difference with smooth scrolling enabled.

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I tried this again, and left it going for a few hours. After setting general.smoothScroll.mouseWheel.durationMaxMS = 1000 , Firefox continues to demonstrate the same behavior: the scrolling will often, but not always, be inconsistent. (in the time stretches where scrolling seems to behave fine, I do like this setting general.smoothScroll.mouseWheel.durationMaxMS = 1000 better than the default -- thanks! If only my scroll were fine all the time...)

Modified by Ekweuka

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Any other thoughts? Scrolling is still inconsistent...

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Does it have any effect if you boot the computer in Windows Safe mode?

Boot the computer in Windows Safe mode with network support (press F8 on the boot screen) as a test to see if that helps.

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I've been trying it out, and operating is Windows Safe mode does give Firefox a "healthy" scrolling response. It is the good response what I've seen in the past/other computers (quite noticeably different from the trouble I've been having).

What do I do to get this good behavior when booting Windows regularly?

Modified by Ekweuka

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Anyone? Anyone? What do I do to get this good behavior when booting Windows regularly?