Firefox 4 and 5 choppy scrolling

Andrew1472

I've been giving Firefox 5 a try and on the whole it is looking pretty good. Speed seems to be improved and memory issues are better too.

The problem I can't solve is horribly choppy scrolling particularly with the keyboard arrows. The index page for this forum is a good example, it jumps and hesitates and is very unpleasant to look at.

Opera, Chrome and IE9 all scroll smoothly, but not Firefox.

I've tried everything I can think of. i.e. clean reinstall, new profile, change all the options and everything on this page http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/795112. Nothing helps.

The smooth scrolling add-on does hide it a bit by making the scrolling so fast that I can't see what's going on, but that's not ideal when I'm trying to find a spot on a page.

My Toshiba laptop is nothing special (Intel i3 and 2gb RAM), but it should be capable enough for Firefox I would have thought. The drivers are up to date by the way. I also have an old Vista laptop, so I dug that out and it has the exact same symptoms.

Does anybody else suffer with this or have any idea how to fix it?

jaydeeuk1

Andrew1472 wrote: »

I've been giving Firefox 5 a try and on the whole it is looking pretty good. Speed seems to be improved and memory issues are better too.

You must have a different FF 5 to me, I found it God awful. I made the mistake of upgrading 3 to 4 not long ago, and found it slow, prone to crashing so thought "Oooh 5, maybe they realised 4.0 was rubbish".

But no, hardly any different, except logmein don't work now either.

I'm guessing they tried to up their game to match IE9, but failed massively. IMO at least anyway.

RussJK

jaydeeuk, try something like MozBackup and do a profile refresh
http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/download.php

All I do is:

• back up the bookmarks and the saved passwords and nothing else, then make a new profile under Firefox 4 and put these into it
• set things up quickly how the person wants it (e.g. tabs on top, bookmarks, about:config to get the 'save tabs on exit' warning, homepage etc)
• put on Adblock Plus with Easylist + MalwareDomainList and then whatever addons they like. Can also install Flashblock or Noscript if particularly security conscious.
• disable or uninstall most plugins, e.g. anything Java. Most cases just have Flash, +/- Quicktime, Silverlight or Office.

I've set up Firefox 4 on a number of computers (even two netbooks) with good results this way. When complete technophobes tell you that things seem faster or that they'd been ready to throw their computer out, then you know it's really had an effect.

Andrew1472

Russ, that is exactly the way I set up Firefox 4 and now 5. If you can get it running properly on a netbook, I'm at a complete loss why I can't on mine.
Incidentally, I tried Palemoon yesterday after you mentioned it, that was choppy too!
I haven't the faintest idea why.

RussJK

Andrew1472 wrote: »

If you can get it running properly on a netbook, I'm at a complete loss why I can't on mine.

No idea either (my post was directed at jaydeeuk, as Firefox shouldn't be buggy like that).

My only thought for yours was it could be something to do with the hardware acceleration, but presumably you've got a standard Intel graphics card? Edit: I see that the link you've tried already mentions hardware acceleration.

From your OP, are you saying that you still get choppy scrolling even when running Firefox in safemode and with hardware acceleration disabled?

dixiebb

perhaps unlikely but take a look at your mouse settings too -- try changing them back to default. must admit, i do experience far better -- smoother scrolling -- with Opera too.

DCFC79

Fine for me on both machines running xp, they were both find on firefox 4,

martinthebandit

FF5 is fine for me too, but I am running Ubuntu

OneADay

Just upgraded to beta 5 and no scrolling problems.
Seems a little quicker loading pages than in 4.
And youtube seems better - videos start playing faster rather than waiting a few seconds.

Andrew1472

RussJK wrote: »

From your OP, are you saying that you still get choppy scrolling even when running Firefox in safemode and with hardware acceleration disabled?

Yes. Safemode doesn't help at all, nor does disabling hardware acceleration.

@dixiebb, I'll take a look at the mouse settings. I think I already did, but I'll double check.
Edit. I can't see a problem with them. If there was a problem it would affect everything though, not just Firefox, wouldn't it?

spud17

Have you checked if 'smooth scrolling' is enabled? It's not set as default if you set up a new profile. But could be wrong.

For Windows, tools/options/advanced/general.