There does not appear to be a memory leak versions 36.01, or Nightly. They are not sucking up my RAM anymore than a normal browser should, so I do not believe a memory leak is involved in this particular issue. (this was tested using the "Spine Example" which was linked in bug 1137251 in version 39 Nightly

The issue of corrupted images is still present in 36.01, but not in Nightly 39.0a1

After a quick, and helpful reply on the VideoLan forum, It's been discovered that VLC player is not actually the cause of system lockups during Direct3D video playback.

I will make note of this on the geforce forum, so that it can be eliminated from the investigation.

Watching videos using Adobe Flash with hardware acceleration turned on does exactly the same thing as VLC player during Direct3D rendering. I was forced to disable hardware acceleration for Flash. I believe that is a driver problem.

The testing you're suggesting above is an quite a bit of work. I'm honestly willing to bet that it's all caused by drivers.

How frustrating would this testing be for me? lol

The workaround for now is probably to use Fx36.0.1 for day to day browsing and Fx39 for video use where otherwise video images would be corrupted.

It is also probably worth testing with the Beta and Aurora {developer edition) channels. in case they also have a fix for the corruption issue. (They both have the memory fix). By default the Aurora version installs as a separate browser with its own profile, but with beta you will need to use the custom install option.

Chasing down the regression range may not be worth the effort whilst Fx39 is working,because whatever the cause it has been fixed somewhere.

Oh the video causing system lockups isn't exclusive to firefox. That's caused by hardware acceleration in VLC, and Adobe Flash (for Firefox, and other browsers) When hardware acceleration is disabled in those two places, videos behave normally in all situations.

Still images (like JPG, PNG, BMP, etc) are the elements that show as black/corrupted when hardware acceleration is enabled in Firefox 36.0 and 36.0.1

Nightly seems like a really good browser. I haven't had a problem out of it. Unless I run into a problem with it, I might just keep using it for day to day stuff.

I truly believe this whole thing is a problem specific to these nvidia drivers.

I gotta say that I love mozilla browsers! They are fast, and generally stable (minus the Adobe Flash HW Acel lockups) in comparison to other browsers, without all the extra overhead. The customization features are absolutely wonderful, and they work well with windows 8.1

I have not tested Nightly with Adobe Flash hardware acceleration enabled. I will do this for troubleshooting purposes, and give you the results shortly.

Nightly 39 is using the HTML5 video player when playing videos on youtube (Primary source of video streaming) firefox 36.0 was using adobe flash to play video content.

With hardware acceleration turned on in Nightly 39.0a1 the HTML5 video player does not appear to cause system lock ups during video playback.

I still do not know whether adobe flash player's hardware acceleration feature would cause lock ups in Nightly, as youtube didn't give me the option to mess with it upon right clicking the video.

Nightly is not intended for day to day use. However I usually use Aurora as the default working bowser, and that is also not entirely intended for regular use, but it is more stable than Nightly. It is rare to get complete breakages or data loss issues on Aurora.

HTML5 will be the way forward. You may be interested in

• http://mozilla.github.io/shumway/
• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Build/Audio_and_video_delivery/Live_streaming_web_audio_and_video#Media_Source_Extensions_%28MSE%29
• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-flash-video-player/

I will look at YouTube in Windows & Nightly sometime over the next few days. Without the addon the prefs to change if you wish to test FlashPlayer on YouTube are I think

media.mediasource.enabled 
media.mediasource.youtubeonly 
media.mediasource.mp4.enabled   

Or it probably still works spoofing the UAS of earlier Firerfox versions.

mhm i know HTML5 is the wave of the future. Good stuff.

I found where I can make the change right in youtube to change it, but it's not readily available to find. I'll test flash player in nightly, and let you know what i find.

ok I was wrong. It doesn't let you change it from youtube in Nightly. I looked into the browser config, and didn't see

media.mediasource.youtubeonly

but the other two options are set to true.

I've gotten firefox 36.01 to switch to HTML5 for youtube playback using the following URL

https://www.youtube.com/html5

Since the youtube issue is fixed with the html5 player work around, I'll stick with it, and keep HW acceleration turned off in advanced settings so the pictures don't break.

Since I believe this issue overall to be a driver related issue, I'm not sure if it's worth dealing with version regression here too much. The images are fixed in nightly, which will eventually make it to release, so I think next is just to wait for nvidia to properly help me troubleshoot their drivers.

Do you want to keep this open, or mark it as resolved?

I've always had trouble when updating Nvidia drivers so I would prefer to wait also to see if an update fixes this.

It's not always easy for me to fix these kind of things because I'm not that much of a techie and I usually have to do time consuming research.

But thanks for all the posts about it. I'll keep watching the thread.

jasoncollege24 said

Since I believe this issue overall to be a driver related issue, I'm not sure if it's worth dealing with version regression here too much. The images are fixed in nightly, which will eventually make it to release, so I think next is just to wait for nvidia to properly help me troubleshoot their drivers. Do you want to keep this open, or mark it as resolved?

May as well mark it as solved. Rather odd though that you need to use Nightly. You can always reopen the thread if Fx39 stops working.

As for Fx39 on the Nightly channel I checked and flipping prefs did not allow me to opt for FlashPlayer on YouTube, but using this addon

• YouTube Flash Video Player https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/youtube-flash-video-player/

does allow Flash Player to be used.

Marking this as resolved. If I have problems with Nightly, or i see a stable driver update which resolves the issues, I will post in this thread to provide updated information.

Thank you for the help!