[Tip] Disable Hardware Acceleration in Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird to Fix Font and Crashing Problems

Hardware Acceleration” (GPU Rendering) is one of the newly introduced features in Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird. It was introduced to increase performance but some Firefox and Thunderbird users may want to disable it as the text might not look well on their screens. Also this new feature might cause random browser crashing problems on some computer systems.

If you also want to disable Hardware Acceleration feature in Firefox or Thunderbird, you can try any of following 2 methods:

Disable Hardware Acceleration in Mozilla Firefox Using Options Window

1. Open Mozilla Firefox, click on Firefox Menu button and select “Options“.

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2. Under “General” tab, scroll down to “Performance” section.

3. Now first uncheck “Use recommended performance settings” option and then disable “Use hardware acceleration when available” option.

Disable_Hardware_Acceleration_Mozilla_Firefox.png

4. Restart the browser to take effects.

Disable Hardware Acceleration in Firefox and Thunderbird Using about:config

If you can’t follow above mentioned steps, try following alternative method:

1. Open Mozilla Firefox and type about:config in the addressbar and press Enter.

Thunderbird users will need to go to Tools -> Options -> Advanced menu and then click on “Config Editor” button.

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[Tip] How to Access “About:Config” Page in Mozilla Thunderbird

It’ll ask for confirmation, click on I’ll be careful, I promise! button.

2. Now look for following 2 preferences:

gfx.direct2d.disabled
layers.acceleration.disabled

3. Both preferences would be set to false. Double-click on both of them and it’ll change their values to true.

That’s it. Restart the program and it’ll turn hardware acceleration feature off.

Also Check:

[Tip] Having Problems with Your Web Browser? Disable Hardware Acceleration Feature

Published in: Mozilla Firefox, Troubleshooting Guides

About the author: Vishal Gupta (also known as VG) has been awarded with Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award. He holds Masters degree in Computer Applications (MCA). He has written several tech articles for popular newspapers and magazines and has also appeared in tech shows on various TV channels.

Comments

NOTE: Older comments have been removed to reduce database overhead.

  1. GPU rendering is great unless you’re hosing your card by mining coins, then firefox artifacts into uselessness.

  2. Sorry for double asking, how to disable it in the latest Mozilla Thunderbird 31? Any idea?

  3. HW acceleration causes missing texts in many of my views so I had to recommend my customers temporarily not to use FireFox. Is any option to disable HW acceleration programmaticaly in HTML?
    It’s not a good idea to teach all users how to turn it off manually in their browsers.

  4. I found a different option that fixes this issue. Now my software works with HW acceleration and also doesn’t crash and stuff. To fix this, you have to disable

  5. As of today November 2017, this still is valid.
    I could not access the firefox settings using remote desktop.
    The 2 settings in About: config ( gfx.direct2d.disabled, layers.acceleration.disabled) did fix the issue for Firefox 56.

  6. Still doesn’t stop the flickering and the latest FireFox doesn’t even offer the ‘advanced’ optoion.
    The flickering is driving me nuts, it just won’t stop.

  7. I can not do it. When Mozila start begin crashing for hardware acceleration all the screen is a mess, Mozila in Linux Debian RT 23 Feb 2018. Yesterday I upgrade, Is there a command line to disable acceleration as Chrome has? Chrome run ok.

  8. Only problem is Firefox has black screen, the error at shell prompt is about [GFX -1 … back buffer … so I cannot get to the menu to disable teh acceleration using the GUI.

  9. Problem might also come from multitasking, having too many tabs opened, RAM and virtual memory.

    support.mozilla.org/fr/questions/1250911#answer-1216221

  10. Thanks for the guide, however after taking all these steps with Firefox it still puts up my clocks like its using hardware GPU acceleration to run the app and I hate it. Theres no scenario where it needs to be doing that.

    Chrome has similar options called Flags, and I had no trouble setting those flags to “Off”. It actually worked!

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