In the past few days, clicking on a menu can cause Firefox to black out the menu area - sometimes it recovers, other times it crashes. Any solutions?
There's nothing more annoying that a browser that blacks out the thing you are trying to look at, or blacks out the entire browser window! Or crashes. I was doing a survey that does not allow repeats; that opportunity has gone forever.
All Replies (4)
hello Dorre, maybe that's an issue with hardware acceleration - please try updating your graphics driver, or in case this doesn't solve the issue or there is no new version available at the moment, disable hardware acceleration in firefox > options > advanced > general.
There may be other things that need attention.
Note that your System Details List shows that you have a user.js file in the profile folder to initialize some prefs on each start of Firefox.
The user.js file is only present if you or other software has created it, so normally it wouldn't be there. you can check its content with a plain text editor if you didn't create this file yourself.
The user.js file is read each time you start Firefox and initializes preferences to the value specified in this file, so preferences set via user.js can only be changed temporarily for the current session.
You can delete the user.js file and the prefs.js file and possible numbered prefs-##.js to reset all prefs to the default value or edit the prefs.js file and remove corresponding lines present in user.js from prefs.js to reset involved prefs.
Thanks, that's really useful to know. Is the user.js file unique to Firefox, or is it used by other programs?
As a temporary fix, I used the graphics control program to downgrade Firefox to power saving graphics - this probably has the same effect as the suggestion above to use Firefox options to turn off hardware acceleration. It seems to have worked. Before, when I clicked on the Firefox button, then help, there was a black square underneath the arrow. After specifying power saving for Firefox in the graphics control program and closing and reopening Firefox it seems OK.
Will report back in a few weeks to let you know if this solves the problem. Thanks!
PS this is the second time, I've typed the info into the reply box. Even though I didn't log out after posting the question, the system wanted me to log in again and lost my reply.
Unique to Firefox it is, if you didn't create the user.js file, delete it.