Firefox Problems (Envy 14)

Anyone using firefox on their envy 14? I updated to firefox 9 recently and had a problem where there were black boxes flashing everywhere. I turned off hardware acceleration and it seemed to get rid of them, however, i still don't think firefox is working 100% correctly.

in dxdiag, the driver version i have for the 5650 is 8.771.1.0.

Thanks!

 

if you swapped gpus while firefox was open and hardware acceleration was on, firefox will crash.

It can't swap to the other gpu. You have to restart firefox.

Turning off hardware accel stops firefox from getting those black boxes.

 

I'm having issues as well. Hardware acceleration is off and the problem occurs whether I'm using high-performance or power-saving GPU.

Here's a screenshot of that I'm getting:

This first photo, you can see I've closed a few tabs and the images remain left behind on the tab bar...



Here you can see the black bars at the top of the screen:

 

Does anyone have a resolution to this? I miss firefox. Chrome just isnt the same.

 

Anybody? Any help is appreciated.

 

hmmm....weird. the only time firefox breaks on me is if I have hardware acceleration on and I swap gpus. Not sure why other issues would happen.

 

Yeah, its really weird. I've tried everything. I'm always running the latest drivers and just cant figure it out.

 

have you tried reinstalling firefox completely (as in starting from a new profile and everything?)

does this happen period..no matter what just when you start firefox?

It's weird. Do you have these same issues in IE9? (which is also GPU accelerated)

 

This happens all of the time. No matter what.

I just did a clean install right now and it didnt correct anything. I was actually worse, but then I disables hardware acceleration and its back to (ab)normal as the images above show.

IE 9 gives me the same problem. Its really lame.

I dont mind using chrome, but I miss having my bookmarks open up in they're own section of the screen to the left like in firefox. I dont like having a separate tab for bookmark manager like in chrome.

 

so it happens in ie9 and firefox? ...do you have any other video issues (say while playing video games) 'cause this is odd/

have you updated direct x?

 

Did you ever find a resolution to this? I have essentially the same computer as you pkrath84, and had this problem arise with the update to Firefox 31. The symptoms are identical, and nothing will fix it, not even a clean install of firefox, which leads me to believe that the problem is buried in the registry. Now that I try to open IE after reading your problems, it crashes on start... not sure what that says. Thanks for any help any of you may have.

 

I found the culprit and a workaround to the problem shown in pkrath's screenshots, and I hope it can help someone. The culprit is the Stardock MyColors theme manager that comes on the HP Envy computers. I'm not sure why this problem is inconsistent in manifesting itself, as it arose for pkrath 2 years before it arose for me under seemingly identical circumstances. Unfortunately, excluding firefox from MyColors did not fix the problem, although it did allow IE to start working again.

Reverting to the standard Win7 Aero theme (or Win7 Classic) solved the problem completely, and is a perfectly valid solution, but these both seem very ugly compared to the HP Envy themes after using them for 3 years.

I did, however, find a workaround that gives the best of both worlds:

First of all, I would like to note that I am running Firefox 33 in Win7 Ultimate on an HP Envy 14 Beats, with an intel i5, from early 2011 (2nd Gen Envy, 1st Gen Envy 14)
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In the firefox navigation bar, type "about:config"

This will bring up a warning about voiding your warranty (a crude joke on open-source software). We know what we're doing, so we'll click right by it.

In the next window, there is a search bar at the top to search the preferences. In it, type "draw"

Near or at the top of the results list will be the preference "browser.tabs.drawInTitlebar"
By default it should be set to "true"

Right-click this option, and select "Toggle"

Close out of the config tab and go back to using firefox as normal
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What this does is prevents firefox from drawing the tabs in the title bar, which is part of the window frame. By moving them out of the frame and into the window, they can no longer be affected by MyColors, or its sister WindowBlinds. This leaves you with a narrow title bar above the tabs, which is slightly annoying, but everything now works, which beats the alternative. If this is too much to bear, the only other option I have found is reverting back to a standard Win7 theme. Good luck!