YouTube and other flash based videos stutter/flicker in Firefox, and this is a major annoyance (usually Firefox has none) with Firefox. This does not happen with other browsers, so why is Firefox causing this? well Its because of its amazing snapshot system which takes a snapshot of your browsing every 10 seconds, this is very nice but this is the main cause of the flickering effect. So how do you get rid of it? Well there is a simple and easy fix for this issue.
- Open Firefox options with about:config (type this in address bar and press enter without quotes).
- In the configuration settings in the filter box type: browser.sessionstore.interval
- You will find this setting to be with the default value of 10000 (this is in milliseconds which is 10 sec)
- Change the value to a higher state anything more than 60000 is good but we recommend that you set it to 120000 which is 2 min or 120 seconds.
- Restart Firefox and load a flash video and now the flickering or stuttering has gone.
hmmm alittle strange, how can changing session restore options affect video loading?
@Meena Bassem:
It doesn’t fix video loading..it fixes jerky playback of video due to the session being saved every 10 seconds.
Didn’t work.
Tried this it helped somewhat, but it still jerks somewhat.
This appears to be an issue with all flash applications and FF as well. Quite interestingly, I have also had an issue with being able to view web based PDF files. I have FF3.5.3, XP, and Adobe Acrobat Pro 9. I have NONE of these issues when I switch to IE. Why can’t FF and Adobe play well with others….
See bug 490122 in Bugzilla (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=490122) – the latest theory is that it’s actually to do with garbage collection, as the session restore tweak only helps some people and not to the full extent.
@Roman: That’s true to some extent but I think its fixed in the new Firefox 3.5.x versions coz I don’t see the bug anymore.
[...] of, except a workarund that works well: to increase the update interval. See here for instance: Fix Flash Video Flickering or Stuttering in Firefox | Dotnetwizard.net | MyDNW.com Also what I think helps is to install the latest flash. Version 10 at least, maybe even the 10.1 [...]
This doesn’t fix the issue with Firefix 3.5.7 on Windows Vista Home Premium 64bit. I had this problem with 3.5.6, but it magically went away (read: they snuck in the fix under our noses).
Firefox 3.6.4, Flash 10.1.53.64 (32 bit, on 64 bit Linux with nspluginwrapper), still flickering. Same with latest 64 bit Flash (10.0.x) and without nspluginwrapper.