[Trainer-talk] Workaround for Firefox Sluggishness Issues

[David Goldfield]

I have posted this to the NVDA list as well as the Firefox support list 
and the Mozilla community on LinkedIn. I am reposting this here in case 
either you or any of your students have noticed performance issues with 
the latest version of Firefox.

Since the release of Firefox 37, I have noticed some issues with 
keyboard responsiveness with NVDA and I have filed relevant tickets 
regarding these issues. Among them were the following issues:
When typing echo is enabled, some Web sites present more of a delay in 
voicing what was typed.
Cursor keys are very slow to respond when playing HTML5 Youtube videos.
On some pages, pressing an arrow key or a quick navigation key works but 
sometimes the cursor is returned to the previous position it was in 
prior to pressing the key.
I discovered that disabling hardware acceleration seems to have solved 
these issues and Firefox seems to be back to normal. I never had to do 
this prior to the 37 release. I have mentioned this on one of the 
tickets I have filed. Until this issue is resolved, disabling hardware 
acceleration may speed up Firefox's performance for those who are 
experiencing performance issues. Here is how to do it.
Press alt-T to go into the Tools menu.
Press O to open the options dialog.
Arrow down to the category called "advanced."
Press the tab key to move to the "use hardware acceleration" checkbox 
and press the spacebar to uncheck this item.
Press enter to activate the OK button and close the dialog.
I do not know if it is necessary to restart Firefox but doing so 
wouldn't hurt.

-- 
      David Goldfield,
Assistive Technology specialist

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