Google Maps turns black shortly after loading, leads to crash!
I was having this issue: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/995980
But as I am on 37.0.2, that solution will not work for me.
I've been having this issue with Firefox & Google Maps for a while now, so I decided to look for other solutions and found this article: http://lifehacker.com/use-google-maps-lite-mode-to-solve-graphical-problem-1545473832
Where it suggests switching to this mode of Google Maps: https://www.google.com/maps/?force=canvas
But when I changed back using this link: https://www.google.com/maps/preview/?force=webgl
I got an error message from Google at the top asking me to reload the page, which after trying, then switching tabs back to the article, then coming back and trying again, caused Firefox to crash.
The crash is clearly a Firefox issue, but is the black maps backgrounds caused by Firefox or Google?
All Replies (3)
That's a hard question to answer, as Google Maps is a very complex application which uses cutting edge scripting techniques. (Probably why it seems to get slower and slower, but I digress...)
Could you try disabling Firefox from using hardware acceleration? On Windows, that can be found here:
"3-bar" menu button (or Tools menu) > Options > Advanced
On the "General" mini-tab, uncheck the box for "Use hardware acceleration when available"
This takes effect the next time you exit Firefox and start it up again. Any improvement?
Since hardware acceleration improves the appearance of fonts and animations, you may want to check your computer manufacturer's website to see whether any graphics card/chipset driver updates are available for your system.
Same problem with my FF. I am opening https://www.google.co.uk/maps it's loading for 2s after that FF is froze. On bottom message I have "Readed mt0.google.com" and it is frozen for about 15min, still nothing changed. Sometimes message is different "Loading from www.gstatic.com....". I don't have English version so maybe it was loading, maybe reading, but you can get the idea.
I don't use acceleration.
Hi radoslawbrus, do recall how long ago the problem with Google Maps started? There have been some changes in recent versions of Firefox that may be independent of the general hardware acceleration setting that also may trip on graphics device driver compatibility issues (e.g., OMTC, Warp GL).
Have you checked for updates to your graphics card/chipset driver software? This article has more info on that: Upgrade your graphics drivers to use hardware acceleration and WebGL.
If you need to disable those newer features, here are the steps:
(Warp GL - Firefox 37)
(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 and pause while the list is filtered
(3) Double-click the layers.d3d11.disable-warp preference to switch it from false to true
(OMTC - Firefox 33)
(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 and pause while the list is filtered
(3) Double-click the layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled preference to switch it from true to false
Note: I read in a bug report that this change causes problems with the HTML5 player on YouTube, if hardware acceleration is disabled, so you might also need to force Flash on YouTube if you keep this setting. You can use an add-on for that: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/youtube-flash-video-player/