Problems with newer releases of FireFox  - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 03, 2023, 02:06:56 pm
content: Around the start of the year, I upgraded FireFox and set it to auto update. Normally I set the admin to prevent updates (since they force it now) once I find something stable. I noticed with YouTube, the entire screen flashes white three of four times when you play a video. I use dark themes and in the dark, all this flashing puts a strain on my eyes. It was also having problem playing video and would frequently lower the resolution. With as much as they force the upgrades, I figured for sure they would fix it. I finally yanked it last night and went to an old version (95.0). Maybe the PC is just too old to run the latest fancy stuff.Searching Google, it seems others have had similar reports with earlier versions.

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 03, 2023, 03:12:21 pm
content: I remember the white flash before turning a page to dark theme, that was long time ago. It eventually went away by itself after a while, don't know if it was FF's fault or the dark theme's fault.My current FF (on Ubuntu) is v116.0, and I doesn't flash. Regarding dark theme, I'm using a FF extension called 'Dark Reader'. However, for EEVblog only, the 'Dark Reader' is set to not change the page, and I'm using another extension instead, called 'Stylus'. Stylus will let you apply your own format to a given webpage. There is one Stylus format ready to download for EEVblog dark themed online, or use the one from here:https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/forum-dark-theme/There is also a dark theme for EEVblog forum that can be selected from the forum settings, no browser extensions needed.Another FireFox-like browser is LibreWolf. LibreWolf is compatible with FireFox plugins/extensions, and has tighter privacy and security. Maybe LibreWolf won't flash.For YouTube, I'm using a FF extension called 'Enhancer for YouTube', can change many settings, including a YT theme, theater mode, default playback speed etc. Can play full screen 1080HD/60Hz at 2x playback speed, with the internal video card of an i4970k proc. YT at 4k/60Hz plays smooth in full screen, but only at x1 speed. At 2x speed it may become choppy sometimes, so I've set the 'Enhancer for YouTube' to only use 1080 even when in full screen.

author: hans
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 03, 2023, 03:30:47 pm
content: It could be that the page itself is first rendered white, and that dark-mode plugins hook in later that apply the dark mode.If your computer is slow, your browser is slow or DOM events are now handled in a different order/pace could all influence this behaviour.The other day I had built a site from scratch with dark mode functionality. I've made sure the server-side part would also apply the dark-mode CSS class thats applied on body, so you don't have this flickering effect. That required me to use 2 cookies which were set client-side; one for the dark mode selection (on/off/system based) and one for dark mode currently applied (on/off). I think many sites do dark-mode functionality client-side (only), as it needs to query some special browser fields to support system mode.I don't think sites like YouTube feature this kind of sophistication yet, because they also tend to run as a single-page application without page refreshes. So why bother?Now I must say that when I open a new tab, the dark theme of my firefox browser also results in the empty tab/page rendered with a dark gray instead of white or light gray. There is brief blink though as YT loads, but it does not always happen .Locking your Firefox version is useful for different reasons as well. I've had pretty bad experiences past half to full year or so with infrequent crashes or other GUI hiccups. Very annoying.

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 03, 2023, 03:37:32 pm
content: It's also possible the issue relates to hardware acceleration, if you PC has enough processing capacity then decoding video on the CPU can work, and it may avoid bugs with the graphics driver which tries to paint video to the same buffer that the CPU is drawing to.

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 03, 2023, 03:42:33 pm
content: Forgot to write, over time I've changed many FireFox defaults from the 'about:config'. To make it use hardware video decoding, my current settings are:media.hardware-video-decoding.force-enabled-> truewebgl.enable-ahardwarebuffer -> truegfx.use-ahardwarebuffer-content -> trueWithout the one in bold, FF uses the processor to decode video, can hear that in the fans that start turning faster at video playback.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 03, 2023, 04:28:44 pm
content: I did try the different accelerator options but no luck. I did not try to change themes but rolling back with the same dark theme doesn't cause the white screen flashes. It seems to be stalling and restarting. Some videos you will hear the opening words twice for example. Once YT does all their popup stuff, things start to settle down and it runs fine. With the older version, none of this happens.I use the same plug-ins in both, U-block and Adblocker Ultimate. I did not install Adblocker with the downgrade as U-block seems to be taking care of most of the garbage but I did install Badger.QuoteI would switch to Vivaldi but I basically keep the network locked down at the router. This includes blocking every IP address that I am aware of that MS uses. They can't push any updates or notify me. Nor can they track my button presses when using their built-in calculator.I think with Vivaldi being based on Chrome, they have some hard coded IPs going back to MS so it will not run.QuoteThanks, I'll check it out.

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 03, 2023, 04:43:29 pm
content: For addblocker, I only use one: uBlock Origin. Usually I check all the lists in uBlock settings, except the lists specific to each country, at the end. Works very well. uBlock Origin also let's you block elements from a page by clicking on it, for example I block side panels I never use in stackoverflow pages, etc. Not sure if having 2 add blockers is good.

author: thm_w
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 03, 2023, 09:33:14 pm
content: Yeah I would try just the one ad-blocker, ublock.Youtube has its own dark theme, I assume you have that enabled and no other plugins for color switching. if you do try turning them off.There is also the youtube enhancer plugin which is great for tweaking default settings, but it may put a larger strain on your PC:https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/enhancer-for-youtube/

author: Circlotron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 03, 2023, 09:55:41 pm
content: A problem I’m having with Firefox on both Win10 and Linux is when I click on a YouTube preview pane and it goes to that video’s page and if I click on the full screen rectangle in the bottom right of the video without waiting for a moment the video goes to about 2/3 screen size and the resize rectangular button disappears. Have to hit the escape key and then full screen a second time. Like I said, on both Win10 and Linux.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 05, 2023, 05:23:31 pm
content: Mobile Firefox is back to a mix of different font sizes again