1233494 - Blank screen paints pixellated segments as mouse moves; fragmented dialogs

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Description

[LorenAmelang]

Attachment: Firefox, no hib, working for hours.png (This shows a pixellated dialog, happens to be from LastPass, but native Firefox dialogs do the same thing. Also shows my add-ons...)

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:42.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/42.0
Build ID: 20151029151421

Steps to reproduce:

New Microsoft Surface Book with i7 and graphics chip, fully updated Win 10x64, latest Firefox. Randomly, maximizing Firefox from being minimized to the tray draws a blank white screen. Or, if the mouse cursor is over it or the screen happens to get touched, a few segments of the proper screen may get drawn right away. Moving the cursor by any means (mouse, touch, pen) "paints" in the screen elements one jagged section at a time. (The shapes and boundaries are similar to the attached screenshot, except the missing bits are white instead of black.)  Minimizing again and maximizing again usually draws the whole screen properly. 


Actual results:

This may or may not be related, but I also see popup dialogs (like the right-click menu) with similarly pixellated segments (see screenshot). Those randomly appear in the middle of otherwise normal operation, unrelated to hibernation or screen detach. The missing bits are black, and I have not noticed them "painting" into place with cursor movement. 


Expected results:

The Surface Book adds several challenges...  The combination of mouse, pen, and touch simultaneously. Combination of Intel integrated graphics (in the detachable screen) and NVIDIA Maxwell GPU (in the keyboard base), with a service monitoring and switching between them. And of course Win 10. These issues have persisted through the "November Update", and do not appear in any other app, so I'm guessing they need attention from Firefox.

Comment 1

[LorenAmelang]

Just remembered another Surface Book challenge - the 3000x2000 pixel screen. Firefox apparently gets scaled up 200% by the Win 10 default scaling setting. Seems to work properly, I have not noticed any of the microscopic icons or text overflowing the allotted fields that plague so many apps.

Comment 2

[LorenAmelang]

Attachment: Firefox morning fragments.png This is an example of the blank screen getting painted in. Sometimes the tabs are drawn, sometimes totally blank.

This is just an example, I've seen tabs fully drawn or not drawn, none, some or all add-on icons, any portion of the screen drawn or not.

Comment 3

[Jamie Nicol [:jnicol]]

The popup menus, and your lastpass screenshot, are almost certainly the same as bug 1232890

Comment 4

[Jamie Nicol [:jnicol]]

The popup menus, and your lastpass screenshot, are almost certainly the same as bug 1232890.

The blank screen could be a different issue.

Could you confirm whether setting layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled=false in about:config prevents the issue from occurring.

Comment 5

[Jamie Nicol [:jnicol]]

And also whether setting layers.acceleration.disabled=true makes the problem disappear?

Comment 6

[LorenAmelang]

(In reply to Jamie Nicol [:jnicol] from comment #4)
> The popup menus, and your lastpass screenshot, are almost certainly the same
> as bug 1232890.

Yes that screenshot looks typical of mine. 

> Could you confirm whether setting
> layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled=false in about:config prevents the
> issue from occurring.

Just set this one only, will wait to see if any jagged black areas still appear. Might take days to convince me they are gone - they are very random.

Comment 7

[LorenAmelang]

That was quick! Seems the setting has made the bug more obvious. And it is now quite repeatable, depending on which page element area I right click in! (Is there some way to make Inspect Element draw all the boundaries at once?) Two example areas in the screenshots. 

Off to try the other setting.

Comment 8

[LorenAmelang]

Attachment: layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled;false #1

Comment 9

[LorenAmelang]

Attachment: layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled;false #2

Comment 10

[LorenAmelang]

I set layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled back to default. 

layers.acceleration.disabled;true seems to have fixed the problem. Or at least made it much less frequent...  I can click all over the areas that were showing the problem repeatably a minute ago, and not one failure - yet. If I catch one I'll comment here. 

OK, caught one already. I was trying to copy text from "layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled;false #1", two boxes above here, and accidentally touched the right side of my Magic Mouse during the drag. Got a totally black right-click context menu. Not repeatable, but they never were without layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled;false set. 

Just caught another one, jagged half-black, right-clicking in that same text element. Guess this is no better than the default config. 

I have noticed many of these bad dialogs will paint in properly if I mouse over them.

Comment 11

[LorenAmelang]

This has stopped appearing, a week or two ago. Now have 43.0.4, and several win 10 updates...  No idea which fixed it.

Comment 12

[LorenAmelang]

Now have Firefox 44.0.2. Not sure when it arrived, but I believe it was here during the Windows updates on Feb 11. The updates have brought this pixellation issue back, both the blank main window and the blacked-out dialogs. 

Found many errors in log viewer from Store and Photos. They began 160211, 7:48PM, with the recent updates: 3135173, Flash Player, lots of Excel/Office updates, and “System Firmware Update – 1/27/2016”, delivered as one single package, just before the change to multiple packages. 

layers.acceleration.disabled;true  --> back to default 160206 (as test; problem has not been seen for ages.)
--> 160215 - back to True, Win update brought problem back.

Too soon to say if the settings change just now will stop it - Will report back when I have a conclusion.