Mozilla problem after upgrading to FC2

[James Wilkinson]

Timothy Murphy wrote:
> However, the fault is really the same,
> as the colours "leak" onto the panel and the rest of the desktop.

I replied:
> What do you mean by "leaking?"
> 
> If you mean that the rest of the desktop suddenly starts using the
> same colours, how deep is your display?

Tim told me:
> I have indeed got DefaultDepth set to 8.
> This seems to be necessary to get Xorg working
> with the ATI Rage Mobility P/M "card" on my Sony C1VFK Picturebook.
> (I had DefaultDepth set to 24 under FC-1, and this worked perfectly.)
<snip>
> There seems to me to be a fault in the "ati" driver,
> which will only work with 256 colours as I said,
> though it seems unlikely to me that this has anything to do
> with my Mozilla problem.

No, that really sounds like the problem.

What else do you run? Can you try opening a number of photos in the Gimp
and other graphics programs? I suspect you'll see exactly the same
effect.

The problem is that you've only got 256 colours for the entire screen.
Those colours aren't fixed: each pixel on screen is an eight bit index
to an array of colour values. Any program that needs to display photos
will have to grab as many of those colour values as it can to get any
semblance of photorealism.

Normally, the window with focus is allowed to set the colours for the
rest of the screen.

This used to be a well known problem in the days of yore when graphics
memory was expensive, and 256 colours a luxury.

Good luck getting your display card working properly. In the meantime,
if you're running the Modern theme in Mozilla, you might find the
Classic theme is less colour-hungry.

HTH,

James.
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