PC begins to stutter unexpectedly.
PC begins to stutter unexpectedly.
That's a solid suggestion that didn't occur to me initially. It happened again today—closed Firefox, the screen went dark briefly, then returned to normal. The second time I opened Firefox, everything worked fine. I should investigate how to disable hardware acceleration in Firefox since it wasn't visible in the settings. Or perhaps just try another browser.
I checked further and it seems to be related to YouTube. The issue appears only when opening Firefox with its latest tabs or a new tab. It works whether I load the homepage or a specific video link. When it happens, the Firefox window becomes blank first, then stutters. The fix is usually closing Firefox, as the NVIDIA driver restarts—screen goes black and refreshes. I’m curious about why YouTube causes this, if it’s the browser itself or extensions.
YouTube has become quite chaotic lately, especially with the ongoing battle against adblockers. Their changes have actually made the site less user-friendly even for regular viewers. I personally use Firefox and have tested Adblock+ and uBlock Origin, but they often cause glitches on YouTube. Now I’m avoiding any adblocker, though sometimes my browser freezes briefly before recovering—only on YouTube. So far, I haven’t experienced a driver crash, possibly because of my older browsing habits, like closing tabs one by one. If you're using a Chromium-based browser such as Edge or Brave on YouTube, there should be a "Report broken website" option available to help with issues.
I decided to give Brave a shot, perhaps I'll switch temporarily and see how it goes. For the Firefox issue, I also attempted to close all YouTube tabs during the incident, but it didn't improve; only restarting Firefox resolved the matter. I'm just glad it isn't a hardware problem. I'm thinking about building a new PC eventually, though right now the cost makes it less enjoyable. Thank you very much for your assistance—I've been struggling with that frustrating issue for some time.