Doesn’t get any worse than this, latest update for Firefox 32 Nightly spoiled the browser, after installing the update and restart, it showed a black screen with no menus (you can’t access anything, everything is black), at the end you’ve to kill the Firefox process in the Task Manager to close it (right clicking on its taskbar icon and selecting Close Window might work too). Let us see how to fix this.
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Update October 25,2014: Mozilla has released Firefox 33.0.1 to address this issue.
Fixing Firefox shows black screen after the launch
1. Select Nightly (Firefox) icon on the desktop, hold the Shift button and double click on Nightly shortcut,
2. When Safe mode dialog appears, click on ‘Start in Safe Mode’, instead of ‘Reset Nightly’ (we don’t know this fixes the problem).
3. When Firefox opens, click on Menu, select Options>Advanced, uncheck or remove tick mark for ‘Use hardware acceleration when available’ .
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Now exit Firefox and relaunch it, the browser will now open normally without any issues, enable hardware acceleration if you want once Mozilla patches the issue.
Have you experienced this with Firefox in the past? How you’ve fixed it then? Let us know in the comments.
Update October 17, 2014: Some users after installing the Firefox 33 update have been greeted with a black window, hope the instructions mentioned in the article are working for them. Are they? Let me know in the comments, so that we may able to find out the reasons behind this.
Thanks! It helps!!
You’re welcome poohkun.
Just did this today and it did the trick. Thanks!
Welcome, can I know which version of Firefox version you’re using? Firefox 33?
Venkat,
It has been doing it with Firefox version 33 lately.
Tony
Yep, I know that, thanks.
Whoopee! Thanks! It helps!
Many thanks ! My Firefox 33 went crazy too, now it works again.
Thanks.. a lot. It helps!!! But it the temporary fix…whenever i want to open the firefox browser, do i need the follow the same. If possible,pls provide the permanent one.
You don’t need to, unless you re-enable hardware acceleration again, you might not experience the same issue.
I agree with Techdows solution. I had to figure out this issue myself and resolved it by turning off hardware acceration.
I have had to repair this issue many times on many of my clients computers. After having tested out all possibilities for problems on different computers it always comes down to: TURN OFF HARDWARE ACCELERATION every time. Hope this helps others trying to resolve their issue.
It does not work. The blank window is the same, nowhere to set it to safe mode. I can blindly bring out the settings window, but it is a black window, cannot do anything with that black window.
If you’re using Windows, select the Firefox shortcut icon on the desktop, hold the shift button and double click on it to get Safe Mode dialog and click on ‘Start in safe mode’, access options and disable hardware acceleration, exit and restart the browser. Has that helped you?
Does not help at all! I still get the black screens. The black screen come and go, almost flashing. If I move the cursor over the menu area at top, parts of the menu becomes visible again.
Sometimes the whole window becomes black, other times it is just the menu area and the sidebars.
Have you upgraded to Firefox 33.0.1 which comes with fix to this issue?
Thank you, it fix the issue.
Thanks A LOT. It DID worked.
You’re welcome vince, glad to know that.