Firefox 3 cured
Recently I blew away ageing 6-STABLE on my workstation and installed afresh 7-STABLE. While at it, I decided to install Firefox3 instead of good ol’ Firefox2. It worked okay, but behold, on certain pages background images were replaced by random pieces of screen widgetry.
I was desperate.
Finally good folks of the FreeNode’s #freebsd-gnome channel, namely Zyl and miwi, told me the relevant more magic line for xorg.conf:
Option “XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps” “On”
And all is warm and cozy again. Thanks!
August 8th, 2008 at 3:38 am
Just a FYI: I can reproduce this problem with ‘nv’ xorg driver, but I can’t reproduce it with nvidia-driver. There was discuss in freebsd-gnome@ list, btw.
August 8th, 2008 at 8:10 am
I should have stated that mine was on unrecognized RV515 based card driven by radeonhd driver.
August 8th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Yeah, thank you very much ! I had the same problem, but I thank it was a problem with a library or my CFLAGS. I made a big switch from 7.0/i386/UP to 7-STABLE/amd64/SMP. I use the “nv” driver because nvidia-driver can’ be used with amd64…
October 4th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
[...] Browser War – Part 1: Firefox2 vs Firefox3RC1 First saved by wasitfate | 1 days ago Pav Lucistnik: Firefox 3 cured First saved by mancabanas | 1 days ago Firefox 2 and 3 Living Together in Harmony First saved [...]
October 16th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
[...] – Firefox 3 cured saved by patti2008-10-14 – More Cool Location-Based SL Widgetry saved by yoz2008-10-07 – Yes, [...]
October 19th, 2008 at 11:57 pm
So, is a bug or not?
In Firefox, Gnome, or X11?
December 13th, 2008 at 3:10 am
This is an age old bug in XAA that cairo brings out. Firefox 3 uses cairo. Recent Xorg releases contain a “fix” of disabling XAA offscreen pixmaps by default (Fedora’s idea). Causes no noticable slowdown. EXA offscreen pixmaps work fine, but some drivers still use XAA.
The FreeBSD PRs have been closed but this is in fact a very serious bug in Xorg, websites can spy on other windows contents, for example. FreeBSD should fix it in my opinion. Either patching Xorg or upgrading it to some newer release should work. Patches can be found in Red Hat/Novell/Ubuntu bugzillas, etc, or Google XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps or something, it’s a 1 line “fix”...
PS Interestingly, this is much less serious on FreeBSD than on Linux.
December 13th, 2008 at 3:19 am
OK, I have dug up this bug report of mine against Solaris about the same issue in Google: http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=4043 (contains link to patch)