Persistent issues with Google Drive/Docs
For the past several months, I've had increasingly worse graphical errors on Google Drive. At first it was only in a few documents, and now it's in every single document. These errors only occur on Firefox, no other browser. Text that I type is constantly blurry, oddly-sized, or oddly-spaced, with some letters touching while others have large gaps between them. I've also had some other small issues, like the document thinking that I'm two people and asking me if I want to see "the changes made my collaborators" when I'm the one currently typing (the documents aren't shared with anyone else, and there are never any changes beyond the ones I make), or showing my cursor highlighted with my name as if I were someone else watching myself type. It's made it more difficult for me to focus on work and I don't know what to do about it.
I've tried the following methods (most of them multiple times over the past months) to solve it, none of which worked: - Running the windows in safe mode - Uninstalling all add-ons and themes, clearing cookies and cache, and then restarting my computer - Uninstalling Firefox entirely, restarting my computer, then reinstalling it - Refreshing Firefox - Looking through pages like Firefox Task Manager and such (although the information there didn't really mean much to me, nothing looked out of the ordinary)
Does anyone have any ideas about what I can do about this? I was ignoring it for a while since it's still legible, but it's become really annoying, especially when it makes some words hard to read. Thanks in advance for the consideration. Here's a screenshot of a document with the weirdly-spaced, blurry text:
All Replies (8)
donthavecow said
Does the same issue happen if you use Chrome?
No, I don't experience any of these issues in Chrome or Microsoft Edge.
Have you by any chance used resist fingerprinting? I have added the second link in case it helps.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-protection-against-fingerprinting https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-cant-load-websites-other-browsers-can https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-and-diagnose-firefox-problems https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/diagnose-firefox-issues-using-troubleshoot-mode https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-extensions-themes-to-fix-problems (also deals with hardware acceleration)
Modified by Terry
terry21 said
Have you by any chance used resist fingerprinting? I have added the second link in case it helps.
I turned on resist fingerprinting, and it caused an immediate change, though the text now appears to be larger and quite blurry. I tried following advice from the other links you shared (changing other preferences, refreshing Firefox, etc.) now with this changed, but none of those seemed to do anything. This is so strange... here is a screenshot of the same document as above, now with resist fingerprinting. Any thoughts?
Modified by matilda27593
It looks like a different font to me. I wouldn't use resist fingerprinting (remove the blank space from the first link below). You can see what fonts are being used in the Inspector (ctl+shft+i); select Fonts in the right pane. Helvetica fonts have been a problem for Windows users (third link is a bug report) and there's a discussion in the thread below (second link) which concerned other fonts but canvassed relevant points.
https://www.reddit. com/r/firefox/comments/ogijg5/using_privacyresistfingerprinting_setting_causes/ https://support.mozilla.org/questions/1325619 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1714197
I have resist fingerprinting turned off and made sure I have websites set to use their own fonts. I inspected the page and selected fonts but it doesn't even register the font that I'm actually having trouble with (the one I'm typing in), it only has a list of the fonts used in the non-interactive parts of the page (like menus). The advice from the other links either didn't work or seems to not apply.
Just curious, but what is the make and model of your computer or did you build it?
If you use "Resist Fingerprinting" then there are a lot of restrictions with accessing fonts stored locally.
You can right-click and select "Inspect" to open the built-in Inspector with this element selected.
You can check in the Rules tab in the right panel in the Inspector what font-family is used for selected text. You can check in the Font tab in the right panel in the Inspector what font is actually used because Firefox might be using a different font than specified by the website.
Google Docs uses an HTML canvas, similar to Firefox's built-in PDF Viewer, so you can't directly inspect the display layer of the document. Frustrating.
I didn't try as much text in my test document, but certainly the spacing is a bit off on some of the letters. I did get a cursor for myself, which is odd, but I don't use Google Docs very often, so I don't have a sense of what its baseline behavior has been in recent years.
