Common Problems

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There are a some commonly reported issues that people may have when using Firefox. This page exists to help you find solutions for them.

Video playback issues (stuttering, video corruption, slowness)

Most video playback issues people experience on Firefox are due to old or buggy drivers. Sometimes, hardware acceleration is not enabled. Follow these steps to solve most video playback issues.

Enable hardware acceleration

1. Click the menu button (☰) and choose Settings.
2. Select the General panel.
3. Under Performance, make sure Use recommended performance settings is checked.
4. Click the Firefox menu (☰), then click Quit.
5. Start Firefox the way you normally do.

If that doesn’t fix your issue, update your graphics drivers.

Update drivers

Note: Do not use Windows Update. Windows Update often has very old drivers.

Visit the driver page for the GPU you have in your computer. If you have a dual GPU machine, download the latest drivers for both of the GPUs in your machine.

• Intel
• Nvidia
• AMD

Enable WebRender

If updated drivers don’t help, you can try enabling WebRender, Firefox’s new rendering engine:

1. Navigate to about:config and accept the warning.
2. Search for gfx.webrender.all
3. Toggle gfx.webrender.all to true
4. Restart Firefox

Using too much memory

Windows: Enable Automatic Page File sizing

We often see reports from people who are running out of memory, often due to low amounts of RAM in their machines. Windows has a built in way to extend the amount of virtual memory available to applications, but this setting may have been changed. Here, we show you how to set it to the recommended setup.

1. Open Control Panel through Windows Search.
2. In Control Panel head to System and Security.
3. Next open the System option.
4. Click the Advanced system settings option from the left pane. A new window, System Properties will open.
5. Click the Advanced tab.
6. Under the Performance section, click the Settings button.
7. Click the Advanced tab.
8. Under the Virtual memory section, click the Change button.
9. Ensure that the Automatically manage paging files size for all drives checkbox is checked.
10. Click OK

Your page file should now be set up correctly.

File a memory bug

If Firefox is using an unexpected amount of RAM, report a bug by following the steps below:

1. Open about:memory?verbose in a new tab.
2. Click Measure and save…
3. Attach the memory report to a new bug
4. Paste your about:support info (Click Copy text to clipboard) to your bug.

If you are experiencing a bug, the best way to ensure that something can be done about your bug is to report it in Bugzilla. This might seem a little bit intimidating for somebody who is new to bug reporting, but Mozillians are really nice!

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