Have found that people had a similar problem with Firefox 33.0 Beta.

Solution appears to be to launch Firefox while in Safe Mode and then to uncheck 'Use hardware acceleration when available' on the Options > Advanced > General tab of the Firefox menu.

Not sure why this happens to only some PCs as all installations of Firefox have the 'Use hardware acceleration when available' setting checked, but only some have this issue.

thanks for reporting back. based on the feedback by other affected user i'm now starting to believe that it might be related to old drivers on machines with intel hd3000 graphics cards - would this apply to your situation?

if so, can you try installing a driver upgrade (assuming your on win7 64bit): https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?DwnldID=23764

Yes, I should have mentioned that problem was on Win7 64bit machines.

I will compare drivers on those machines that have had a problem with those that have not. Most of our machines are the same make and model and it may be possible that some have had driver upgrades that have not been applied to others.

you can quickly gather that information by typing about:support into the firefox address bar - on the site that opens is a graphics section, which contains the driver version.

until now all the reports i have seen did contain Device ID: 0x0116 (that's a intel hd3000) & driver versions 8.15.10.2266 (Driver Date: 12-16-2010) or 8.15.10.2291 (Driver Date: 1-27-2011). it would be very helpful if you could compare that with your setup.

Reviewed all our machines on Spiceworks and can see that machines with the problem have Intel Processor Graphics Driver version 8.15.10.2279

Those without the problem have version 8.15.10.2752 or 9.17.10.2932

So solution appears to be to upgrade to version 8.15.10.2752 or above . . .

would you also see if the graphic units' device id is 0x0116 on all these workstations?

Graphics Device ID on all machines is 0x0102

also have one machine with Graphics Device ID 0x0102 (also Intel HD Graphics 3000) and driver version 8.15.10.2653 and this is OK

This problem appears to be related to having an old driver version for the Intel HD Graphics 3000 card.

The solution is to upgrade the driver.

A temporary work around is to be to launch Firefox while in Safe Mode and then to uncheck 'Use hardware acceleration when available' on the Options > Advanced > General tab of the Firefox menu.

Thank you philipp for all your assitance

thank you too for your valuable feedback - i will relay that into the appropriate bug reports and hope that mozilla's developers can come up with a fix for other affected users (even if it is just blocklisting firefox from using hardware acceleration with old drivers)

just for info, all machines now updated with Intel HD Graphics 3000 driver version 9.17.10.3517 downloaded from https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?DwnldID=23764 and functioning properly