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Why does my Mozilla Firefox window screen turn black when I open it?

  • 3 replies
  • 128 have this problem
  • 103 views
  • Last reply by santo.sg

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When I open Mozilla Firefox, it starts off white, then it turns black. There are no buttons whatsoever that you can click on, except the minimise, maximise, and close buttons. Why is this happening?

When I open Mozilla Firefox, it starts off white, then it turns black. There are no buttons whatsoever that you can click on, except the minimise, maximise, and close buttons. Why is this happening?

Chosen solution

Can you start Firefox in Safe Mode by holding down the Shift/Options key?

You can try to disable hardware acceleration in Firefox.

  • Tools > Options > Advanced > General > Browsing: "Use hardware acceleration when available"

You need to close and restart Firefox after toggling this setting.


It is possible that your security software (firewall, anti-virus) blocks or restricts Firefox or the plugin-container process without informing you, possibly after detecting changes (update) to the Firefox program.

Remove all rules for Firefox and the plugin-container from the permissions list in the firewall and let your firewall ask again for permission to get full, unrestricted, access to install for Firefox and the plugin-container process and the updater process.

See:

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Chosen Solution

Can you start Firefox in Safe Mode by holding down the Shift/Options key?

You can try to disable hardware acceleration in Firefox.

  • Tools > Options > Advanced > General > Browsing: "Use hardware acceleration when available"

You need to close and restart Firefox after toggling this setting.


It is possible that your security software (firewall, anti-virus) blocks or restricts Firefox or the plugin-container process without informing you, possibly after detecting changes (update) to the Firefox program.

Remove all rules for Firefox and the plugin-container from the permissions list in the firewall and let your firewall ask again for permission to get full, unrestricted, access to install for Firefox and the plugin-container process and the updater process.

See:

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Thanks so much it works now. :)

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The Mozilla Foundation need to be more helpful.

Firefox (Desktop) has been the default browser for long. But for sometime including the current version Version 34.0.5, the whole window goes black after a while since opening.

Once it gone black, we have no means to close it from the browser window itself as there are no buttons whatsoever that you can click on, except the minimise, maximise, and close buttons.

Solutions given above are not suggesting what to do from the blacked-out Firefox (Desktop) browser window: How to close etc.. Or we loose all the works works we have done halfway.

When all other browsers could work well with the security software (firewall, anti-virus), why only Firefox (Desktop) browser is behaving like this? This brings down the reliability/ dependability / usability of the Firefox (Desktop) browser.

The Mozilla Foundation may come up with right solution. Thanks.