I haven't heard any reports of problems with those panels in Firefox 47 during its 6 weeks in release, but then, I can't possibly read every thread.

Do you get your Firefox directly from Mozilla or through whoever packages your distribution?

Could you test in Firefox's Safe Mode? In Safe Mode, Firefox temporarily deactivates extensions, hardware acceleration, and some other advanced features to help you assess whether these are causing the problem.

You can restart Firefox in Safe Mode using either:

• "3-bar" menu button > "?" button > Restart with Add-ons Disabled
• Help menu > Restart with Add-ons Disabled

and OK the restart.

A small dialog should appear. Click "Start in Safe Mode" (not Refresh).

Any improvement?

If you need to go through the back door:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button promising to be careful.

Health Report

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste health and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the datareporting.healthreport.uploadEnabled preference to switch the value from true (default) to false

Telemetry

(4) In the search box above the list, type or paste telem and pause while the list is filtered

(5) Double-click the toolkit.telemetry.enabled preference to switch the value from true to false (default)

I didn't research the crash reporter; you can decide on a case-by-case basis whether to submit a report when the dialog comes up.

You can do manual Firefox updates (Help -> About Firefox -> Check for update) with Firefox on Linux if it is a official build from say www.mozilla.org/firefox/all/ and not a third-party build like say a Firefox package from your Linux distro or a build you compiled yourself. Also for the official builds make sure the user has read/write permissions for the Firefox folder so it can do updates, a easy was for only user is to put folder in /home.

It may be usefull to know what Linux distro including version number that you use. Also note Firefox will be updating to Fx48 any time now, but Linux distros are often behind time especially if they use their own builds of Firefox.