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Tabs glitching out, videos going silent

  • 3 replies
  • 5 have this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by Taykitty

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Sometimes when I close a tab, the next tab it changes to will glitch out and have a few artifacts of the website I was just on. For instance, I can have a Google.com tab and a Youtube video in another. if I close the youtube video and go to the google tab, some of the objects from the youtube tab will appear on the google tab.

As for the videos going silent, this is mainly youtube. When I'm watching a video and want to skip forward, the video will act as if it's pause. The pause button will change to have the play symbol instead, but won't change back to pause when I click it. The video will continue to play and the audio will be completely mute. The only way to fix that has been, so far, to close and reopen the tab. So far, it mostly occurs when I go fullscreen.

I'll try and get a picture of the first problem, but the second problem is so random, I'm afraid I won't be able to get anything to show.

Sometimes when I close a tab, the next tab it changes to will glitch out and have a few artifacts of the website I was just on. For instance, I can have a Google.com tab and a Youtube video in another. if I close the youtube video and go to the google tab, some of the objects from the youtube tab will appear on the google tab. As for the videos going silent, this is mainly youtube. When I'm watching a video and want to skip forward, the video will act as if it's pause. The pause button will change to have the play symbol instead, but won't change back to pause when I click it. The video will continue to play and the audio will be completely mute. The only way to fix that has been, so far, to close and reopen the tab. So far, it mostly occurs when I go fullscreen. I'll try and get a picture of the first problem, but the second problem is so random, I'm afraid I won't be able to get anything to show.

Chosen solution

Did the glitches just start recently? Firefox 33 introduced a new feature called "Off Main Thread Compositing" (OMTC). There is a preference to disable this feature if you want to try that. You might need to exit and start Firefox up again after making the change.

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Click the button promising to be careful.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste layer and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled preference to switch it from true to false.

Any difference?


Regarding the YouTube videos, are these playing in the Flash player plugin or in Firefox's built-in HTML5 player? Usually you can distinguish them by the right-click menu for the player: Adobe's plugin has a distinctive short context menu instead of Firefox's standard right-click context menu.

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Chosen Solution

Did the glitches just start recently? Firefox 33 introduced a new feature called "Off Main Thread Compositing" (OMTC). There is a preference to disable this feature if you want to try that. You might need to exit and start Firefox up again after making the change.

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Click the button promising to be careful.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste layer and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled preference to switch it from true to false.

Any difference?


Regarding the YouTube videos, are these playing in the Flash player plugin or in Firefox's built-in HTML5 player? Usually you can distinguish them by the right-click menu for the player: Adobe's plugin has a distinctive short context menu instead of Firefox's standard right-click context menu.

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I'll report later on whether or not turning that option off worked.

As for whether or not I use HTML5, I believe I do. The right click menu says something about HTML5.

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Looks like the glitching with my tabs and everything is gone now. And I think I've figured out that videos not playing is a flash problem. So this is solved!