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All text unreadable when I start Firefox

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When I restart my Windows 7 system and start Firefox for the first time of the day, all of the text is unreadable, like if all letters of words are compressed into one space. This includes tab names and website text. I think screenshot explains this better. When I quit firefox and start it up again, the problem is gone.

When I restart my Windows 7 system and start Firefox for the first time of the day, all of the text is unreadable, like if all letters of words are compressed into one space. This includes tab names and website text. I think screenshot explains this better. When I quit firefox and start it up again, the problem is gone.

Chosen solution

We usually associate such rendering issues with hardware acceleration.

It can also be a problem with some fonts that clear up for some reason after a restart.

You can do a font test to see if you can identify corrupted font(s).

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All Replies (5)

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Can you attach a screenshot?

  • Use a compressed image type like PNG or JPG to save the screenshot
  • Make sure that you do not exceed the maximum size of 1 MB

You can try to disable hardware acceleration in Firefox.

  • Tools > Options > Advanced > General > Browsing: "Use hardware acceleration when available"

You need to close and restart Firefox after toggling this setting.

You can check if there is an update for your graphics display driver and check for hardware acceleration related issues.

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sorry, I thought I posted the screenshot before. I will try the acceleration, but it's strange, since when I restart firefox, the problem goes away. So it doesn't bother me too much, I'm more interested in what could have happened

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Suluhisho teule

We usually associate such rendering issues with hardware acceleration.

It can also be a problem with some fonts that clear up for some reason after a restart.

You can do a font test to see if you can identify corrupted font(s).

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there were no corrupt fonts as a result of the font test, I set the hardware acceleration to off and will post results upon next boot Thank you for support sofar

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I disabled the hardware acceleration and it seems to have done the trick, thanks a lot for your support. I have been getting some other symptoms of a bad graphics driver as well, so it seems logical.