This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

How to fix slow printing of images in Firefox on Linux

  • 2 iimpendulo
  • 1 inayo le ngxaki
  • 1 view
  • Impendulo yokugqibela ngu Mark_D

more options

We have been having ongoing issues printing from Firefox under Linux. We mostly use Ubuntu, but i've tested this in a couple of other distro's Images (mainly .JPG) opened in Firefox are significantly slower to print than in other apps. I've tried multiple drivers to several printers but have the same issue. A sample image printed from firefox can take 2 or 3 times as long to print as from Ubuntu's inbuilt image viewer, Gimp or chrome. Also, once the .jpg jets large enough (approx >8MB) i just get blank pages. pc's: mostly Ubuntu 14,04LTS x64 printers: selection of Ricoh MFD's Drivers: have tried several Ricoh ones, as well as generic CUPS and Xerox.

Thanks

We have been having ongoing issues printing from Firefox under Linux. We mostly use Ubuntu, but i've tested this in a couple of other distro's Images (mainly .JPG) opened in Firefox are significantly slower to print than in other apps. I've tried multiple drivers to several printers but have the same issue. A sample image printed from firefox can take 2 or 3 times as long to print as from Ubuntu's inbuilt image viewer, Gimp or chrome. Also, once the .jpg jets large enough (approx >8MB) i just get blank pages. pc's: mostly Ubuntu 14,04LTS x64 printers: selection of Ricoh MFD's Drivers: have tried several Ricoh ones, as well as generic CUPS and Xerox. Thanks

All Replies (2)

more options

Do you happen to know if older versions of Firefox were able to print images faster and not blank pages in the ~8mb image case?

It would be helpful to know if a previous version of Firefox was handling printing better. Then someone could look into why it got worse.

And this happens across multiple Ubuntu machines?

Start by trying version 39: https://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-39.0-SSL&os=linux&lang=en-US

Then if that works you can increase the version number in the url to download the later versions and test those. Ex. 40.0, 41.0, 42.0

Once you think you have enough info, you can file a bug here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/

Give us a link to your bug report afterwards and we can try to get a developer to investigate the issue. Thanks!

more options

Hi! sorry for the delay. We have found the speed issue is also affected by the print driver installed. Firefox is still slower, but. With a PCL driver, its really painfully slow. With a Postscript driver its still slower than other apps, but the difference is small enough that our end users don't notice. I'm guessing that something in firefox that doesn't like how CUPS handles PCL I realize this is more of a workaround than a fix, but i need to move on to other issues.

Thanks for your feedback