Firefox: transparent region intermittently appears

Issues & Assistance Cinnamon
1

Hi,

I have been encountering this strange phenomenon lately. At random moments, a big-gish region in the Firefox browser becomes totally transparent, exposing the desktop or a window below it. Usually the region is a rectangle on the north-west just below the navigation buttons and address bar. This happens when I am moving the mouse around. I have to move the mouse again before Firefox restores the region. This behavior only happens with Firefox and only on RebornOS; not happening on terminator or chromium and on Firefox on Windows.

It is irritating because I may be reading around the area or about to click on a link. Is it just me, or does anyone else also have this problem?

2

Hi @lilaboc !

  1. Would you be able to give some information about the hardware? Which GPU do you have? inxi -G
  2. Which desktop environment are you on?
  3. Do you use X11 or Wayland? (You can usually see it on a menu on the login screen or in settings)
  4. Also, could you check if you have the same problem with the appimage version of Firefox?
3
  1. I am running inside vmware.
  2. cinnamon 5.4.12
  3. The login screen only allows me to choose cinnamon. No mention of wayland. How do I check this? /usr/lib/Xorg appears inside ps -ef output.
  4. Not familiar with appimage. How do I check this?

I forgot to mention that this behavior started only 15-20 days ago.

4

Thanks. Do you have hardware acceleration enabled? And what does inxi -G show?

5

As far as Wayland is concerned, Cinnamon has no support. GNOME supports wayland (and does it quite well), KDE supports Wayland (with some problems still), and Sway (Windows manager) supports Wayland.

Referring to your problem with Firefox: are you presented with another browser? Try using another browser to see what happens. I personally have no experience with VMWare, but there could be a problem with the video driver of it under some circumstances.

6

@shivanandvp I have enabled Accelerate 3D Graphics in the vmware setting. I have a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 in my host computer.

$ inxi -G | nc termbin.com 9999
https://termbin.com/y4np0

@Rafael I have tried chromium, Google Chrome, and Opera. They behave very nicely. I also have no issue with other graphical tools such as gvim, calculator, terminator, CuteMarkEd, and even SumatraPDF (launched with wine). For what it’s worth, I have set Window focus mode to Sloppy and have enabled Automatically raise focused windows. Firefox is my default browser and I never had any problem with it ever since I installed antergos in a VM and later switched to RebornOS. And Firefox is fine on Microsoft Windows. This behavior manifests rather recently under Reborn.

7

Hmm. Hard to say. We can try a few things:

  1. Does troubleshoot mode work fine? Diagnose Firefox issues using Troubleshoot Mode | Firefox Help
  2. Does your problem look like the picture in here? 1714483 - Firefox GUI graphics error (partly transparent) if FXAA has been manually enabled in NVIDIA X Server Settings (Antialiasing)
  3. Does your problem look like this bug? 1516224 - Semi-Transparent YouTube video playback
  4. Try what this comment says: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/ddbjqx/comment/f2ffw4m/
  5. Could you change your desktop theme and check? Like in here: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/5yj73y/comment/deqyurw/
  6. Try this answer and the ones below it: nvidia - Firefox is rendering window and pages transparent and flickering - Ask Ubuntu

Let me know how these go

1 Like
8

@shivanandvp I apologize profoundly for not responding to your reply for a long time after you had went out of your way to research into possible causes and solutions to my problem.

After checking the advice on settings in about:config, I found that entering into Troubleshooting Mode to fix the problem. On further investigations, I found that disabling hardware acceleration in Firefox was sufficient; none of the extensions that I have installed were the culprit.

Once again, thank you very much for your excellent assistance.

2 Likes
9

No need to apologize. Glad your problem is solved!

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