Laggy scrolling in Firefox w/Aero enabled.

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stop!theradio

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I noticed laggy scrolling on web pages in the latest non-beta release of Firefox when I have Aero enabled. I'm running Vista Home Premium on the following hardware:

AMD Athlon xp 2.2GHZ, 2GB Patriot PC3200, Leadtek Winfast A400 (Basically a high-spec 6800) and the system is more than capable of running Aero along with Firefox. I run Firefox on a weaker spec'd machine without the lag so I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas. If I disable Aero and use the "Basic" style instead, scrolling is smooth again. Drivers are all updated.
 
Thanks for the link, but it's terribly outdated and you can now enable it as a feature in the options. I never enable "smooth scrolling" because it just seems funky to me, but the regular scroll itself is laggy. Like when I'm scrolling up and down pages with images and even just text it doesn't scroll uniformly...it's kind of like a tearing effect, vertical-wise.
 
I disable all scrolling stuff in Firefox 3 preferences, then go into about:config and change the following:

Type mousewheel and give it a second to bring up the variables.

5th from the bottom of the list should be mousewheel.withnokey.numlines which has a default of 1, I change that to 9 and it responds almost exactly as IE does by default (my preferred scroll amount).

4th from the bottom is mousewheel.withnokey.sysnumlines and I change that to false (default is true, of course) so it ignores any settings inside the preferences if I forget.

After that, it scrolls exactly the way I want, smoothly (well, smooth enough for me to be satisfied with it). :D
 
I had laggy scrolling in Firefox (with aero enabled) until I updated my video drivers.
 
reinstall video card drivers like anss123 said. I agree, the only time i had laggy scrolling was when i was running without gpu drivers. it cant hurt to try.
 
mnewxcv said:
reinstall video card drivers like anss123 said. I agree, the only time i had laggy scrolling was when i was running without gpu drivers. it cant hurt to try.
Click to expand...

Come on, you don't think I've tried that? Lol. I've used 4 different drivers, each time wiping all of the old drivers, disabling the onboard VGA, etc, and it's the same issue. Other people have experienced similar situations, as I've found while lookin around, and so far I haven't seen any answers.
 
well not sure why it's happening - no problems on my end.

but i took a look around and did find this add-on - haven't tried it but hopefully it works for you. it's pretty popular and either way it's worth a try:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5846

EDIT: just tried it and it's not bad - i used the ideal settings posted in the reviews by a guy named Jumping Jack. ideal settings are as follows:

- Stride Size of Scroll: 100
- Smoothness - Start of Move: 7.08
- Smoothness: 80.0
- Acceleration Sensitivity: 144
 
Usquabach said:
well not sure why it's happening - no problems on my end.

but i took a look around and did find this add-on - haven't tried it but hopefully it works for you. it's pretty popular and either way it's worth a try:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5846

EDIT: just tried it and it's not bad - i used the ideal settings posted in the reviews by a guy named Jumping Jack. ideal settings are as follows:

- Stride Size of Scroll: 100
- Smoothness - Start of Move: 7.08
- Smoothness: 80.0
- Acceleration Sensitivity: 144
Click to expand...

That's a really cool tool, but what I think some of you need to understand is that this isn't an actual "scrolling" issue in Firefox, exactly. It's more of a video card/drivers issue. Scrolling up and down with the tool may be nice and make things more "smooth", but the visual tearing is still very much there. Perhaps it's an issue with the 2D capabilities of the card I'm using?
 
stop!theradio said:
That's a really cool tool, but what I think some of you need to understand is that this isn't an actual "scrolling" issue in Firefox, exactly. It's more of a video card/drivers issue. Scrolling up and down with the tool may be nice and make things more "smooth", but the visual tearing is still very much there. Perhaps it's an issue with the 2D capabilities of the card I'm using?
Click to expand...

For some reason I keep thinking about overlay. Some older video cards really sucked at it. My spare computer has a GeForce FX5600 and god it's slow when smooth scrolling is enable, and Flash movies tear like nobody's business.
 
Interesting tidbit:

I uninstalled the 6800 and I'm on the integrated graphics. It doesn't support Aero, BUT - basic runs fine with good scrolling and good window movement, maximizing, minimizing, etc.

What the hell?
 
does the 6800 support downclocking in desktop mode in the driver?
 
stop!theradio said:
It supports general downclocking of the CPU and memory...are you suggesting it might help?
Click to expand...

well I'm thinking if the driver thinks you don't need 3D horsepower in desktop mode and clocks down as if you're using XP..

But Aero needs your GPU's 3D power..

Just an idea to try out.
 
The install of Vista I had was an "upgrade" install, keeping all old files, programs, etc. I remembered that if I do a fresh install, I can have everything "new" but it would keep my old files in the "windows.old" folder. I went ahead and reinstalled everything fresh and the problem is solved.

Thanks a lot for your help, guys, I definitely appreciate it. :cool:
 
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