How to fix Firefox jerky scroll (Linux)

[LanTHrusteR]

Hello all.

I was trying to get the same impression of ease and speed Chrome scroll has from Firefox 17 @ Linux, AMD64 and after trying several setups here is how to make your Firefox to give even better feel than Chrome:

1. Set mousewheel.min_line_scroll_amount to 40
That was a great start though Firefox scroll will still appeared jerky. (Chrome has that value lower, but I liked it at 40)

2. Set general.smoothScroll and general.smoothScroll.pages to false
Smooth scrolling is bad for the IT professionals giving extra pressure to the eyes and Chrome doesn't use it in the same way as Firefox does. Now we're close but still all the pages in tabs are a bit jerky.

3. And now the final ingredient. It appears that all the hieratic scroll was caused by image discard check routine. Do not turn it off just set image.mem.min_discard_timeout_ms to something really large, I set mine to 2100000000

After that increase image.mem.max_decoded_image_kb to at least 512K

Done. In my case (Gentoo, amd64) this setup changed how the page within tab scrolls (very smooth now), how FF switches between tabs (it's now very smooth too, chrome like) and overall impression of how all the opened tabs are performing was increased. May be the change is not same within different systems but it's worth a try if you want to improve FF responsiveness.