white content screen

[whmoll]

After a random length of time, the Firefox content screens go white. The top menus are still there. If I change to a new tab, the content screen is black monentarily and then goes white. If I exit and restart Firefox, it works fine for a random length of time. Then, it happens again.

I uninstalled Firefox, deleted the Firefox folder, then downloaded and installed the latest version. The problem is still there. It is annoying. I searched for the problem, but all references are years old.

Any suggestions?

Bill Moll

[LIMPET235]

Try running in Firefox "Safe Mode".
> http://kb.mozillazine.org/Safe_Mode
or... Help > Re-start with Addons disabled or hold down your Shift key as you click the Firefox short cut..
Do not check any boxes.
This is a fault finding mode.
NB: Be careful of the "Delete all bookmarks except for back-ups" option.

Don't add any extensions or themes until it's working O.K.
If Firefox is O.K. in Safe Mode then it's possibly an extension/theme...etc causing it.
Run Firefox in normal mode & disable them all. Re-start Firefox.
Enable each in turn, or by ½'s, re-starting Firefox each time, till the faulty extension is found.
Either update or un-install it.

See this incomplete list,
> http://kb.mozillazine.org/Problematic_extensions

When in Safe Mode...
* The status of plug-ins is not affected.
* Custom preferences are not affected.
* All extensions are disabled.
* The default theme is used, without a persona.
* userChrome.css and userContent.css are ignored.
* The JIT/Javascript compiler is disabled.
* The default toolbar layout is used.
* Hardware acceleration is disabled.

[therube]

Going white sounds like a precursor to going black, which typically indicates an OOM (Out Of Memory) situation, & may be a precursor to an actual crash.

So, when this happens, about how much RAM is FF using?

If it is an OOM situation, a 64-bit FF may help, some.


(For reference only, as the bug is old, & most likely not relevant today, Bug 1108253 OMTC: Screen Goes Black.)

[deustroop]

I have the black screen all the time, very annoying. It is intermittent but a regular occurrence. I have tried the steps suggested above. A part of the screen goes black, then the entire screen. The frame remains and the browser changes sites , the curser is active, etc., but there are no graphics.Launching another window gives the same result. Closing and reopening the browser corrects the problem. The event does not happen with IE 11.
Windows 10 event viewer says that "the display driver stopped responding and has successfully recovered" listing event ID 4101.There is no solution for this problem on the NVIDIA forum.

Maybe a bright light here has the solution ?

[DanRaisch]

Have you tried disabling hardware acceleration in Firefox? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1075185

[deustroop]

I tried turning off acceleration but that made no change in the nature or frequency of the issue.

[dickvl]

What is the Firefox memory usage when this happens?
It is possible that Firefox isn't able to allocate enough memory.

You can also try to disable multi-process mode by setting the browser.tabs.remote.autostart prefs to false the about:config page.
http://www.ghacks.net/2016/07/22/multi-process-firefox/

[deustroop]

I'm going to try removing acceleration again and will look at memory usage. The system though has 32GB so that should not be an issue, eh ?

[Daifne]

deustroop,
Why did you hijack whmoll's topic? You already have your own topic where you are getting help. Hijacking someone else's is really quite rude. whmoll has been lost because you did this.

[deustroop]

My apologies.I will use the other thread.

[Daifne]

Thanks