Firefox 3 displays pieces of desktop background

[Warren Block]

On Mon, 17 Nov 2008, Kevin Oberman wrote:

>> Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2008 07:11:57 +0100
>> From: Christoph Moench-Tegeder <cmt at burggraben.net>
>> Sender: owner-freebsd-x11 at freebsd.org
>>
>> ## Mark Kirkwood (markir at paradise.net.nz):
>>
>>> I'm on 7.1 Prerelease refreshed a few days ago. I've noticed that
>>> Firefox 3 (3.0.4, but 3.0.3 was the same) displays snippets from ones
>>> desktop on some webpages (yahoo and youtube being the 2 most recent).
>>
>> Image rendering was optimized in Firefox 3, so it breaks with a lot
>> of xservers (seems as if some pixmap rendering code is broken in X
>> and firefox triggers that problem).
>> Try setting Option "XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps" to "true" in the "Device"
>> section of your xorg.conf.
>
> Christoph,
>
> Thank yo so much for this suggestion.
>
> I have been annoyed by this odd problem since I started using Firefox3
> and this finally make things work correctly. I think this needs to be in
> a FAQ somewhere until/unless the Xorg driver is fixed.
>
> In any case, I was seeing this with an ATI Radeon X300 M22 graphics
> chipset. I don't seem to see it with my nVidia GeForce 7800 GT based
> system. I don't THINK I see it with my old MGA Matrox G450  , but I
> won't have my eyeballs in front of that system until next month, si I am
> not sure.
>
> Anyone seeing this with any other graphics device that does not use the
> RADEON driver?

Happened on my MGA G450.  Removing the XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps option from 
xorg.conf shows that some scaled images in Firefox3 3.0.4,1 still render 
as either black boxes or partly black.  It used to also show the desktop 
background in some windows, but I didn't see that in a quick check.

-Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota USA