Graphics instability and crashing after upgrade from FF 32 to 33

Question

Soon after upgrading from 32.0.3 to 33 (Windows 7), I was seeing occasional flicker-like split-second black flashes. (I *think* this was mostly when opening new pages, but I don't recall for sure...maybe also when scrolling). Then a few minutes later I was scrolling a page with my laptop touchpad and the screen flashed completely black, stayed that way for about a second, and then came back up with a Windows message that Intel Graphics had recovered from a crash. (Which is doubly interesting given that FF set to use my discrete NVIDIA graphics on this computer.). I haven't seen anything like this happen in the nine months I've had this laptop, with or without FF open. There was also a message that FF had crashed.
Then I restarted FF, and all was going OK, except that I believe I still saw a few split-second "in the blink of an eye" black screens as I opened new pages. But then I went to Google Maps, and was dragging a map upwards. But instead of the lower portion of the map moving into view, I only got a blank white screen. The further up I dragged the map, the more of the the screen that was blank white, until it was completely white. Then FF crashed again.
I thought the new FF native H.264 might be causing the issue so I disabled it and restarted FF. But then I went back to Google Maps, tried the same thing and had the same issue (but no associated crash, although I closed FF very soon after I saw the odd graphics behavior recurring so maybe I didn't give it enough "time to crash").
I re-installed 32.0.3 and all the issues went away. FWIW, I've had occasional crashes and slowdowns with 32 and other recent versions. (I could recover from the slowdowns just by restarting FF.) Most of those issues seemed to be associated with Adobe Flash. That behavior was an occasional annoyance but nothing of the magnitude of what happened when I tried FF 33. I don't know if this latter observation adds anything, but I just thought I'd throw it out there. Fyi, the laptop has 2.4 Ghz CPU (Intel i7) and 16GB memory.
Any ideas? Thanks.

Answer 1

Today when I noted that Lenovo still hadn't released an updated driver specifically for the Intel Graphics, I went back and installed a Lenovo NVIDIA Optimus update that I had tried 4 or 5 months ago but had subsequently reversed because it had created problems with Firefox. (Specifically, it was causing Firefox context menus to render slowly and incompletely.) Not only does the NVIDIA update no longer cause the FF context menu problem, it seems to have *solved* the problem I posted about here. It updated the NVIDIA driver ("GPU #2" above) from version 9.18.13.1269 to version 9.18.13.3302.
This makes some intuitive sense, since -- as I said above -- I have Optimus set to use the NVIDIA graphics with Firefox instead of Intel. (I had thought that, based on what I read in Lenovo support, the NVIDIA Optimus update might install a new Intel Graphics driver as well, but the Intel driver is still shown as the same version listed above (8.15.10.2725). (I don't know whether or not these driver numbers might be Lenovo-specific.)
Anyway, the NVIDIA Optimus update fixed my problem, so thanks for pointing me in the direction of graphics drivers. (I suppose there's also a small possibility that something had simply gone awry with my first update to FF 33, and that what really solved things was simply reinstallingl...)