Dynamic Pixel Shift in Firefox with Radeon 9800 Pro and LC..

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.videocards.ati (More info?)

I recently upgraded my ViewSonic 17GS CRT monitor to a Dell 2001FP flat panel
display. Aside from the obvious quality improvement from a 6+ year old CRT
(well past end-of-life for a CRT in terms of image quality), one of the first
things I noticed was a strange pixel offset effect in Firefox 0.8. I thought
maybe it'd go away with a fresh install of Firefox, but it didn't (I
installed 0.9 from a clean install - wiped 0.8 completely first). I don't
see it in other applications, just in Firefox. This is on a Win2K box using
an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro with recent (but-not-quite-latest) drivers. I've used
various different versions of the drivers. No change in behavior.

What I mean is this... When I load a page, sometimes Firefox can't decide
where exactly things (text, images, whatever) belong. It places them
someplace, and if I scroll the screen or highlight text, it'll decide to move
that "stuff" over by about one pixel (in any direction). It's as if there
are two web pages loaded - one which is the initial display, and one which is
the "real thing" - and they may be offset by a pixel in any direction. If I
scroll off of the "initial display" page, I'll see a clear line of
demarcataion, and if I highlight anything on the "initial display" page, it
reveals the "real thing" underneath.

I'm not sure how to explain this better, but I have taken a pair of
screenshots to demonstrate. It doesn't demonstrate some of the nastier
effects of this bug (like showing a pixel shift in the middle of an image or
showing a line of text with a row of pixels missing - an upward shift of the
bottom of the line or a downward shift of the top). I put a subset of the
two screenshots into an animated GIF file at
<http://www.eharrishome.com/pix-shift.gif> - As you can see, every second, it
flips back and forth between the two frames. In one (nothing highlighted),
you see the image as it loads. In the other, I've hovered the mouse over the
T-shirt picture (which caused it to shift), I've highlighted part of the
second line of text under "Firefox T-Shirt", and I've highlighted (and kept
highlighted) some text further down the page, causing it too to shift.
Sometimes, only the highlighted text shifts. In this case, the whole line
shifted together. And in this case, everything shifted left.

Is this a FireFox problem or an ATI Catalyst problem? In either case, why
does it only show up in Firefox, and why only after I got an LCD monitor?

--
Erik Harris n$wsr$ader@$harrishom$.com
AIM: KngFuJoe http://www.eharrishome.com
Chinese-Indonesian MA Club http://cimac.eharrishome.com

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