What's the difference between doing a "Refresh" of Firefox versus doing a clean Re-install of firefox?
My screen glitches in firefox. When I load a webpage, type in the "awesome bar," or scroll pages, there are sometimes black and/or gray boxes and lines that distort portions of the display. When I scroll or put my cursor over them, they go away. It typically only happens when initially on a page. In searching for solutions, I found some people suggesting a "Refresh" of Firefox through Mozilla while others suggested doing my own Re-install of Firefox by deleting the old install files and re-installing. How do the two methods compare? Are they achieving the same thing? Or is one recommended over the other?
Chosen solution
Very different:
- Refresh partially clears settings without disturbing the program files. See: Refresh Firefox - reset add-ons and settings
- A reinstall after removing the program folder replaces program files without disturbing settings
But in your case, clearly Firefox has a compatibility issue with your graphics. The question is how best to address that. Since your OS is pretty new, you might already have the latest available driver software for your graphics card but, just in case, this article suggests safe ways to check that: Upgrade your graphics drivers to use hardware acceleration and WebGL.
To see whether the problem is hardware acceleration, you can experiment with turning that off.
"3-bar" menu button (or Tools menu) > Options
In the left column, click Advanced. On the right side, with the "General" mini-tab active, uncheck the box for "Use hardware acceleration when available".
This takes effect the next time you exit Firefox and start it up again. Any difference?
A different setting that sometimes helps, especially Nvidia users, is disabling OMTC:
(0) Select and copy the following new preference name:
layers.offmainthreadcomposition.force-disabled
(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Click the button promising to be careful.
(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste layers.off and pause while the list is filtered
(3) Right-click a blank area of the page, click New, then Boolean
(4) Paste the preference name, then click OK
(5) Select true, then click OK -- the preference should appear in the list, bolded, and user set to true -- if you need to remove this later, right-click > Reset it
I think you probably need to restart Firefox before that takes effect.
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Chosen Solution
Very different:
- Refresh partially clears settings without disturbing the program files. See: Refresh Firefox - reset add-ons and settings
- A reinstall after removing the program folder replaces program files without disturbing settings
But in your case, clearly Firefox has a compatibility issue with your graphics. The question is how best to address that. Since your OS is pretty new, you might already have the latest available driver software for your graphics card but, just in case, this article suggests safe ways to check that: Upgrade your graphics drivers to use hardware acceleration and WebGL.
To see whether the problem is hardware acceleration, you can experiment with turning that off.
"3-bar" menu button (or Tools menu) > Options
In the left column, click Advanced. On the right side, with the "General" mini-tab active, uncheck the box for "Use hardware acceleration when available".
This takes effect the next time you exit Firefox and start it up again. Any difference?
A different setting that sometimes helps, especially Nvidia users, is disabling OMTC:
(0) Select and copy the following new preference name:
layers.offmainthreadcomposition.force-disabled
(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Click the button promising to be careful.
(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste layers.off and pause while the list is filtered
(3) Right-click a blank area of the page, click New, then Boolean
(4) Paste the preference name, then click OK
(5) Select true, then click OK -- the preference should appear in the list, bolded, and user set to true -- if you need to remove this later, right-click > Reset it
I think you probably need to restart Firefox before that takes effect.
I made sure all my drivers were up-to-date and they were. I also turned off hardware acceleration, and I think that fixed the problem.