NVIDIA graphics driver crashing

[Justinh]

In the past two public builds of SM I've experienced the graphics driver crashing a few times while in the browser. Just now, I had only four tabs open (to pages I visit often) and was filling out a form on a page. I double-clicked in a field to get the field history so I could select a value and then Windows told me my driver crashed.

I don't recall this ever happening over my 10+ years of using SM. I've updated the graphics driver twice to the newest version. I can't find a common thread that leads to the crash.

Any way to prevent this? Or find root cause?

Win7 x64, NVIDIA GT 630

[Frank Lion]

I've used older NVidia cards than that with SM in my time and had no trouble ..but, I did have 'Use Hardware Acceleration....' OFF, as HA causes problems of all sorts.

That would be an easy thing for you to try, you'll find the setting under Edit>Prefs>Appearance>Content.

There are no ill effects in having HA disabled, just no graphical glitches or problems like yours anymore.

[Justinh]

Thanks. I just toggled it off, so we'll see.

[frg]

If you can provide a crash id I can check if it corresponds to a known bug. If it is fixed in later releases a backport might be possible.

[Justinh]

How do I get a crash ID? SM doesn't crash; it stays running.

[-Px-]

Type about:crashes in address bar, you should see some IDs there

[Justinh]

Thanks. Yep, got nothing of recent, I suppose since SM itself did not crash.

[Frank Lion]

Thanks. I just toggled it off, so we'll see.

Any driver crashes yet?

Your card is not even that old (2009-2010?) so you wouldn't expect HA to be behind this, but I've seen it so often all over the place that I reckon for the very specific and limited benefit that HA offers that Mozilla should never have had it enabled by default.

[Justinh]

Nothing yet, but it is not all that frequent. I may take a month or two to know.

In what situation is HA used?

[Frank Lion]

In what situation is HA used?

Not many really, I think some high end online games and the like - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_acceleration