Resetting the appearance of FireFox
OK, I've done something really stupid, I've installed Window8.1 ona new laptop. I installed Firefox and things seemed to be be going OK then suddenly the colour scheme changed. I've tried the option to "Refresh Firefox" and it all works until I resize the window and then it goes back to the new impossible to read colour scheme. Looking under tools -> plugins -> appearance it says I'm the default theme. But the colour scheme it has switched to has white tabs with very very light grey writing and the "X" to kill the tab is now white on white. I end up having to click on parts of the screen where I guess the function I want might be. Sorry I've not managed to install enough stuff on to this new box to be able to give a screen shot of the problem. Help Please
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OK, this might not be something inside FireFox, I've just tried installing Chrome as a temporty work around and quickly it shifted to do exactlty the same thing. Lots of white writing on a white background.
Start Firefox in Safe Mode to check if one of the extensions (Firefox menu button/Tools > Add-ons > Extensions) or if hardware acceleration is causing the problem.
- Switch to the DEFAULT theme: Firefox menu button/Tools > Add-ons > Appearance
- Do NOT click the Reset button on the Safe Mode start window
- https://support.mozilla.org/kb/Safe+Mode
- https://support.mozilla.org/kb/Troubleshooting+extensions+and+themes
Make sure that you haven't enabled a High Contrast theme in the Windows/Mac Accessibility settings.
See also:
Great, thanks If I start FireFox in safe mode then I can read all the stuff at the top of the window. The webpages themselves were all OK. It was the tab titles which were very pale grey on white, but the "X" was white on white. Then the whole of the next row down, with the back button and the URL box were all white on white including the menu button, which makes finding it some much easier. Now I just need to work out which plugin is recking everything for me. More to the point I think will be to get onto the phone to HP and find how I can get this PC back down on W7 ASAP. W8.1 is causing me lots of problems. But that is a subject for a different forum.
You can try to disable hardware acceleration in Firefox if you haven't tested this yet.
- Tools > Options > Advanced > General > Browsing: "Use hardware acceleration when available"
You need to close and restart Firefox after toggling this setting.
You can check if there is an update for your graphics display driver and check for hardware acceleration related issues.
If it works in Safe Mode and in normal mode with all extensions (Firefox menu button/Tools > Add-ons > Extensions) disabled then try to find which extension is causing it by enabling one extension at a time until the problem reappears.
Close and restart Firefox after each change via *"3-bar" menu button > Exit (Power button)
- Windows: File > Exit
- Mac: Firefox > Quit Firefox
- Linux: File > Quit
If the Firefox window is maximized then try to un-maximize or possibly set browser.tabs.drawInTitlebar to false on the about:config page.