928770 - FF text gets corrupted after Windows 8.1

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 812695

(Core :: Graphics: Text, defect)

Description

[owenw4rd]

Attachment: screen capture from about:addons page

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; rv:27.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/27.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20131020030202

Steps to reproduce:

After installing Windows 8.1, FF versions 24 and higher display corrupted text on many web pages. 


Actual results:

Some text on certain web pages appears mangled and hard to read. See attached screen capture. Selecting the text with the mouse cursor sometimes restores it. Reloading the page usually restores the text. Vertically scrolling the page, clicking around or moving the mouse cursor on the page usually corrupts the text again. It appears to be a javascript or css issue. I'm even seeing it happen on the text in this window.

The problem goes away running Firefox in Safe Mode. But none of my add-ons is causing it. I disabled all add-ons in normal mode and the text corruption still happens. I'm running the default Theme.

It's not a zoom level issue or a ClearType issue. 

Turning off ClearType does not fix the problem, just removes the ClearType pixels. 

One example is on youtube pages in the comments section. The text corruption is random, but repeatable. The same text will get corrupted every time.


Expected results:

The text should appear normal. In Windows 8, this was not a problem. After Windows 8.1 was installed it started happening.

Comment 1

[Andre Klapper]

Thanks for taking the time to report this!
Does the problem still happen if you start Firefox in Safe Mode? (Safe Mode disables extensions and themes, hardware acceleration and some JavaScript stuff in order to exclude some possible reasons for problems. It does not disable plugins which are add-ons.) See http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode 

And does this also happen with a new and empty profile? See http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Basic%20Troubleshooting#w_8-make-a-new-profile and http://support.mozilla.org/kb/Managing%20profiles . 

If you still see this problem in the new profile, please enter the address "about:support" in the address bar and attach (using the "Add an attachment" link above) the output for your original profile (not the new profile), as the "Modified Preferences" section could be interesting. 
Thanks for your help!

Comment 2

[owenw4rd]

Attachment: Troubleshooting Information.xht

Comment 3

[Jim Jeffery not reading bug-mail 1/2/11]

While not a fix, see if flipping this fixes the issue: 

about:config
gfx.content.azure.enabled  set to false and restart browser

Comment 4

[owenw4rd]

(In reply to Andre Klapper from comment #1)
> Thanks for taking the time to report this!
> Does the problem still happen if you start Firefox in Safe Mode? (Safe Mode
> disables extensions and themes, hardware acceleration and some JavaScript
> stuff in order to exclude some possible reasons for problems. It does not
> disable plugins which are add-ons.) See
> http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode 
> 
> And does this also happen with a new and empty profile? See
> http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Basic%20Troubleshooting#w_8-make-a-new-
> profile and http://support.mozilla.org/kb/Managing%20profiles . 
> 
> If you still see this problem in the new profile, please enter the address
> "about:support" in the address bar and attach (using the "Add an attachment"
> link above) the output for your original profile (not the new profile), as
> the "Modified Preferences" section could be interesting. 
> Thanks for your help!

The issue does *not* happen in Safe Mode. It *does* happen in a new profile with all plugins disabled.

I attached the support document.

Comment 5

[Loic]

I think it's a dupe of bug 812695, especially because your computer has ATI GPU.
Did you install the update KB2670838 on your machine?

Comment 6

[owenw4rd]

This issue is exactly what I'm seeing, except for me it started happening with Windows 8.1:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/953209

I'll try the gfx.content.azure.enabled work-around and/or the gfx.direct2d.disabled if that doesn't work.

Comment 7

[owenw4rd]

I tried setting gfx.content.azure.enabled to false. That fixed it.
I also tried setting gfx.direct2d.disabled to true with gfx.content.azure.enabled set to true. That also fixed it. I reset gfx.direct2d.disabled back to false since the azure change was enough.

Comment 8

[owenw4rd]

Attachment: troubleshooting information.txt

Comment 10

[Masatoshi Kimura [:emk]]

(In reply to Loic from comment #5)
> I think it's a dupe of bug 812695, especially because your computer has ATI
> GPU.
> Did you install the update KB2670838 on your machine?

KB2670838 is an update for Win7. This bug is reported on Win8.1. Probably the corresponding change would be incorporated from the start.

Comment 11

[owenw4rd]

Just one more note for future reference: Disabling hardware acceleration did *not* fix it. 
Setting gfx.content.azure.enabled to false *did* fix it.

Comment 12

[owenw4rd]

(In reply to Owen Ward from comment #11)
> Just one more note for future reference: Disabling hardware acceleration did
> *not* fix it. 
> Setting gfx.content.azure.enabled to false *did* fix it.

Correction: disabling hardware acceleration *did* fix the problem. 

Un-checking 'Use hardware acceleration' in Options sets gfx.direct2d.disabled and layers.acceleration.disabled to true. Setting either of those to true fixed the text corruption. But setting gfx.content.azure.enabled to false fixes it without disabling hardware acceleration.