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Visual disturbance of lines of text in Firefox, particularly when using AOL mail

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When moving the cursor around the AOL mail list of e-mails, or around the text within a message, some lines of text become fuzzy: some letters are emboldened and others weakened. When you click on the affected area, it clears to normal, but may revert to fuzzy when the cursor is moved again. This happens sometimes on web pages too. It does not happen in Internet Explorer, however, so I can only think it is a problem with Firefox.

When moving the cursor around the AOL mail list of e-mails, or around the text within a message, some lines of text become fuzzy: some letters are emboldened and others weakened. When you click on the affected area, it clears to normal, but may revert to fuzzy when the cursor is moved again. This happens sometimes on web pages too. It does not happen in Internet Explorer, however, so I can only think it is a problem with Firefox.

Asịsa ahọpụtara

Try to disable hardware acceleration in Firefox.

Start Firefox in Safe Mode to check if one of the extensions (Firefox/Tools > Add-ons > Extensions) or if hardware acceleration is causing the problem (switch to the DEFAULT theme: Firefox/Tools > Add-ons > Appearance).

  • Do NOT click the Reset button on the Safe mode start window or otherwise make changes.
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All Replies (5)

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Many site issues can be caused by corrupt cookies or cache. In order to try to fix these problems, the first step is to clear both cookies and the cache. Note: This will temporarily log you out of all sites you're logged in to. To clear cache and cookies do the following:

  1. Go to Firefox > History > Clear recent history or (if no Firefox button is shown) go to Tools > Clear recent history.
  2. Under "Time range to clear", select "Everything".
  3. Now, click the arrow next to Details to toggle the Details list active.
  4. From the details list, check Cache and Cookies and uncheck everything else.
  5. Now click the Clear now button.

Further information can be found in the Clear your cache, history and other personal information in Firefox article.

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Thanks for the advice. Unfortunately it hasn't cured the problem. Any other ideas?

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Asịsa Ahọpụtara

Try to disable hardware acceleration in Firefox.

Start Firefox in Safe Mode to check if one of the extensions (Firefox/Tools > Add-ons > Extensions) or if hardware acceleration is causing the problem (switch to the DEFAULT theme: Firefox/Tools > Add-ons > Appearance).

  • Do NOT click the Reset button on the Safe mode start window or otherwise make changes.
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Many thanks. In following your advice I came across mention of Java as a potential problem. I had installed it some weeks ago. I checked online and found that Microsoft had issued a warning about it in January. As a result, I uninstalled Java, and this seems to have cured the problem.

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Further to the above, the problem has since recurred so I've reset Firefox. We'll see what happens. I'll report back in a couple of days.