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Why does Firefox redraw webpages after it loads them?

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SInce upgrading to 14.0.1 on Ubuntu, Firefox has been redrawing pages after it loads them. I notice this particularly on my tumblr dashboard. I've fiddled with some memory settings, but nothing I've tried seems to change this behavior. There's still some general sluggishness handling pages with many images, particularly rescaled images it seems, and the browser has crashed or become totally unresponsive a few times since yesterday's upgrade.

SInce upgrading to 14.0.1 on Ubuntu, Firefox has been redrawing pages after it loads them. I notice this particularly on my tumblr dashboard. I've fiddled with some memory settings, but nothing I've tried seems to change this behavior. There's still some general sluggishness handling pages with many images, particularly rescaled images it seems, and the browser has crashed or become totally unresponsive a few times since yesterday's upgrade.

All Replies (7)

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Hi,

You can consider the Reset Firefox feature via Help (Alt + H) > Troubleshooting Information. If the problem persists, you can also try to deselect Use hardware acceleration when available in Preferences > Advanced > General. The Ubuntu forum would also be helpful.

Options

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If you have submitted crash reports then please post the IDs of one or more crash reports (bp-xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx).

  • You can find the IDs of the submitted crash reports on the about:crashes page.
  • You can open the about:crashes page via the location bar, like you open a website.

See:

If you can't open Firefox then see:

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No crash reports since June, but it did crash yesterday without automatically offering to submit a report. When it hangs sometimes (since the upgrade from 3.x) I've killed the whole session and rebooted. I don't believe any crash reports were generated from those. If it crashes and issues a report before I get this reloading thing figured out, I'll post the number.

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Thanks. I probably will try the reset feature even though a return to default settings will cause crashes and headaches until I find the right values again. We'll see.

It currently isn't using hardware acceleration.

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Well, I tried the reset option. Things seem zippy now with the default options, however, it still draws images on my tumblr dashboard twice. Zippy, but nevertheless it takes nearly twice as long as it should, and besides it's kind of annoying. This seems to happen particularly with images that are read from the cache. Possibly it's only happening with progressive jpgs, which tumblr uses on its dashboard, but I'll need to test that.

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Also, if you are using a proxy, you can try to temporarily choose No proxy in Preferences > Advanced > Network > Settings to see if it helps. Another thing you could try is to open the Web Console and then load/reload/hard reload the page. Clicking on the GET links related to problematic images and comparing it with the normal images would hopefully provide more info, if it is network/header related. You can also try starting Firefox via the terminal, the terminal may have helpful messages related to the jpeg library. If it is the Ubuntu Firefox, the Ubuntu forum may also have helpful information, especially new developments related to the new release.

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Now I realize that it isn't just cached images. All images on my tumblr dashboard are doing this right now, and I've noticed it on other sites but haven't been testing them.

The web console shows that the downloads look okay. The redrawing happens after the images are downloaded. There are many css errors registered prior to the initial painting of images. Those don't seem to affect the initial display of the page and its images which were properly downloaded. It is only after this process is complete that the redrawing begins.

I'll try starting from the console. I'm also looking at MOZ_DISABLE_IMAGE_OPTIMIZE=1 which isn't well documented, in my opinion. If that makes a difference I'll note it here.