Is this issue related to my ancient 15-year-old graphics card, my browser, or something else?
Just my troubleshooting tips:
Can you run a benchmark, maybe this one, so we can see it it’s really a general thing not just something on that website? Also we can compare it to other computers, or you can see if changing a setting helps at all.
Can you see something strange in about:processes? Shift+Esc is its keyboard shortcut.
Can you try it in other browsers? Something Chrome like (Chromium, Brave, Vivaldi). Does this happen there as well?
Can you run a benchmark, maybe this one
Can you see something strange in about:processes?
I can’t find anything suspicious but here’s a snippet of it:
Can you try it in other browsers?
I used Ungoogled Chromium and it opens the pop-ups smoothly (so Firefox is causing the problem):
Why the benchmark is at 90fps? What happens if you lower your monitor refresh rate to 60?
Lowered my monitor’s refresh rate to 60 Hz and it didn’t resolve the issue
Also lower it in the DE settings. Are you on wayland?
I changed it via Debian’s Settings app.
I’m using X11 and Gnome.
What’s the rest of the hardware? Tried disabling hardware acceleration and see if it makes a difference?
I disabled recommended performance settings and hardware acceleration in Firefox and I’m still experiencing this issue:
Then it’s not the GPU, as it doesn’t appear to be using it in the first place.
Why are you using the ESR version?
I would either add the Mozilla repo or install the Flatpak
Edit: I saw your other comments
What desktop are you on?
I have Flatpak Firefox and it’s giving me the same issue as Firefox ESR.
I’m using Firefox ESR because Flatpak Firefox started freezing after a couple of updates and ESR is super stable.
As for my desktop: Gnome - X11
Have you tried switching to Wayland?
Log out and select the Wayland
I can’t find that option in my login screen’s gear icon menu. I think that the reason why I can’t use Wayland is because I have a Radeon HD5450 graphics card that is 15 years old.
Wayland doesn’t care much about underlying hardware as that’s abstracted away by the kernel level stuff.
Are you using GDM?
Edit: https://wiki.debian.org/Wayland#GNOME_.28supported_since_3.20.2B-.29
It looks like Wayland is the default
It’s most likely the CPU or less likely a browser bug.