Browser Stability and Hardware Acceleration vs. Power Consistency?

[tifipa2943]

Hi everyone,
I’ve been a loyal Pale Moon user for quite a while now, primarily because I appreciate the project's dedication to keeping a lightweight, efficient engine that doesn't treat my RAM like an all-you-can-eat buffet. However, I’ve run into a bit of a technical head-scratcher lately that I wanted to toss out to the community.
A specific point I often see discussed in the support threads here is the "Use hardware acceleration when available" setting. Generally, I keep this on to help with smooth scrolling and video playback. My current situation is a bit unique, though; I travel frequently for work and often find myself in older industrial buildings where the electrical infrastructure is… let’s just say "questionable."
My portable workstation relies on a compact power module designed to handle the universal 110-220-volt range https://serverorbit.com/power-supplies/power-module/110-220-volt. While it’s built to be robust, I’ve noticed that in locations where the 110v line is particularly noisy or prone to micro-dips, Pale Moon occasionally hangs or displays "checkerboard" artifacts during rendering. It seems to happen right when the power supply has to work hardest to stabilize the output. It’s almost as if the browser is sensitive to the tiny voltage ripples that might be reaching the GPU during those transitions, causing the rendering process to hitch. When I switch back to a stable 220v environment, the issue disappears completely.
I know it sounds like a bit of a reach, but given how Pale Moon interacts more directly with the hardware compared to heavily sandboxed browsers, do you think it’s possible that the rendering engine is more susceptible to these minor power delivery inconsistencies? Or am I likely just looking at a weird driver interaction that happens to coincide with my travel schedule?

[Moonchild]

Pale Moon doesn't do anything super low-level with the hardware. Even if accelerated, it will still go through the normal interfaces (DirectX or OpenGL, or XRender, depending on your O.S.)
Issues with power delivery don't really come into the picture in our level of operation, so it's more likely the GPU just becomes less stable at the driver level; especially if you're seeing checkerboarding that usually means the GPU is artifacting due to VRAM stability issues, and that is way outside of the browser's scope. It is, however, very possible that Pale Moon in that case exposes the problem more readily than browsers using slower async rendering processes or Skia for compositing page content, and the like.