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Firefox 40.0.3 Mozilla Firefox for Ubuntu canonical - 1.0

Ubuntu 14.04

I have a slight suspicion it could be something about hardware acceleration of the display? Is it possible there is a setting in about:config that is used to activate some type of rendering that is not functional on my computer and GPU? Starting in safe mode yields non-responsive windows, I think. No display still.

Maybe I needed vacation, but I'd like to resume work instead, now.

Update: after 3 days of searching: it seems that the Firefox 40 is INCOMPATIBLE with prefs.js settings you might have had done in the far past. Not only that, it is possible this rendering abomination is brought on by the fixes in prefs.js that were specifically done to cure the garbled display in some previous Firefox updates! (gfx.*) ...I will test that...

The trouble REALLY is that the old GFX settings are now useless! Firefox windows use internal firefox rendering not only for the webpages, but for the menu and URL bar and bookmarks toolbar! And the gfx.* settings are now obsolete, so when you deactivate the rendering engine, expecting the old one to kick in, but that one seems to be deleted from existence now.

New problem is here: black text is gray. How do I change that?!?!?!

You can check the prefs.js file in the Firefox profile folder to see if it has a gfx.xrender.enabled line.

• user_pref("gfx.xrender.enabled", false);

If you find this line then try to remove it.

cor-el said

You can check the prefs.js file in the Firefox profile folder to see if it has a gfx.xrender.enabled line.

• user_pref("gfx.xrender.enabled", false);

If you find this line then try to remove it.

I reset the gfx settings, all of them... but... now the text is TEENY TINY if it is not rendered gray... I so much hate Ubuntu, why can't I have the simple and reliable rendering of Windows 95 style?

Now some webpages have literals in the text literally smaller than they have been on IBM 12" monitor, for those who remember it. What is the point of owning a computer, I ask?

the white space on some webpages is so huge, I don't even recognize those webpages... and letters teeny tiny, hard to read from any distance, it is as if the letters shrunk in the webpage layout, simply horrible. :(

You may have zoomed web page(s) by accident. Reset the page zoom on pages that cause problems.

• View > Zoom > Reset (Ctrl/Command+0 (zero))

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Zoom_text_of_web_pages

Try to set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to 1.0 (default is -1) on the about:config page. If necessary adjust its value in 0.1 or 0.05 steps (1.1 or 0.9) until icons or text looks right.

You can open the about:config page via the location/address bar. You can accept the warning and click "I'll be careful" to continue.

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/about:config

cor-el said

You may have zoomed web page(s) by accident. Reset the page zoom on pages that cause problems.

• View > Zoom > Reset (Ctrl/Command+0 (zero))

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Zoom_text_of_web_pages

Try to set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to 1.0 (default is -1) on the about:config page. If necessary adjust its value in 0.1 or 0.05 steps (1.1 or 0.9) until icons or text looks right. You can open the about:config page via the location/address bar. You can accept the warning and click "I'll be careful" to continue.

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/about:config

no, zoom is not the problem, the other setting may be more like it, but it was NOT me who altered it! It was both Ubuntu AND Mozilla who trough all the updates changed the look and feel of the displayed content so much that it didn't resemble the original at all.

If such an easy fix was available all the time, why didn't they apply it before forcing the updates? Seems like the logical choice for me...

The menu bar is broken... it does not list all contents (why the hell not?!?!?!) and it opens in a different display than the firefox browser. Who thought that deleting exactly one or two items of the menu list and adding scroll arrows is a genius move? Other than opening it on a monitior I am not looking at, that is. (monitor that is many times turned off, as well)

Apropo: at 1.2 pixels per px, I think the web is starting to look normal. At least some pages that I use since 2013... So, why is the default so malformed compared to what it should be? Who is stealing the 20%? That is way more than a minute difference!

You know, you could easily implement a measuring tool that would render simple text in a layout before and after Firefox upgrade and adjust the setting by itself to achieve the same look. Is that possible? Because I am not the only one with this problem and given how many websites with temporary solutions I have seen to this display problem, it would be VERY ADVISABLE to have such a tool. It could then report back to mozilla the OS and render results to debug these upgrades easily.

Any chance of seeing that?

P.S.: I am not the only one who spent countless hours trying to tune rendering and display properties either in the operating system or browser just to get the previous look, only for it to be invalidated by updates beyond my control. Then the process repeats and occasionally causes firefox not to work at all after the update (this last time). Why don't users have any choice or say in what they want to see? I was completely OK with just GDI.

In the past Firefox didn't honor the system DPI setting on Linux, so "-1" didn't really had effect. Current releases do support the system DPI setting and thus you can see its effect.

• bug 1081142 - [HiDPI] select an appropriate scale factor on Linux

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