#1145099 /usr/bin/firefox: In Debian build of Firefox text rendering is messed up on AMD iGPU. Firefox original build works okay.

Package:
firefox-esr
Source:
firefox-esr
Description:
Mozilla Firefox web browser - Extended Support Release (ESR)
Submitter:
Tomasz Sztejka
Date:
2026-08-22 11:59:02 UTC
Severity:
normal
#1145099#5
Date:
2026-08-22 11:57:49 UTC
From:
To:
Dear Maintainer,

 Recently I tried to upgrade my Kubuntu system do something more friendly and of course
 I did choose Debian + KDE. To my surprise after starting Firefox strange artifacts did appear.
 It looks like if some letters are moved around a bit during rendering, sometimes streched.
 It happens both in web-page content and other text elements (ie settings page, tabs headers).
 The effect is temporary, because forcing the text to re-render itself, ie. by selecing text
 or moving mouse over it, changes the look.

 My configuration is using Ryzen internal GPU, everything freshly installed, no tinkering,
 nothing. Just what installer did.

 The behavior is the same in both X-11 and Wayland session.

 What did I try and what did not help:

  - adding kernel amdgpu.sg_display=0 option - did not help, but I could mess here something up.

 What did help, but I do not like to use:

  - disabling hardware acceleration at all solved the issue;

 What did help and what I like to use:

  - downloading a build of Firefox directly from firefox web page. This build works without
 alike problems, hardware acceleration enabled.

 What other things I did notice:

  - I had alike problems with Kubuntu version, but this was far worse, a total non-operability
 in X-11 session.
  - I noticed that a traceable side effects of this nature appear in Konquerror too. It is more
 like parts of characters to be shifted a bit, instead of whole letters, but it is there.
 This may suggest that a problem is in some shared dependency.

 Unfortunately since this system is my only system and is non-operational now I can't for some
 duration to respond to any emails.