Firefox hoverover flickers sometimes

[Noah Slater]

Binary package hint: firefox

Some times when browsing with tabs moving your cursor over a link makes the cursor icon flicker between the pointer and the hand. The status bar also flickers between showing the link's href value and nothing.

[Noah Slater (nslater)]

I have noticed that when you are hovering over the link there is usually a tab that flickers between focused and not focused.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

we need a step-by-step introduction on how to reproduce

[Xeno Campanoli (xeno)]

This bug is a long time idle. I've got one on a flicker (#123132) which I am actively watching, but I've not seen this at all though I've been playing with Firefox a lot. Perhaps the reporter could review this and close it as fixed if it's no longer occurring.

[Noah Slater (nslater)]

I can confirm that I still experience this. I am also unable to offer any steps to reproduce other than it occurs after heavy usage with a lot of tabs, say 100 or more.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

On Wed, Jul 04, 2007 at 10:32:45PM -0000, Noah Slater wrote:
> I can confirm that I still experience this. I am also unable to offer
> any steps to reproduce other than it occurs after heavy usage with a lot
> of tabs, say 100 or more.
>

is this the case only in firefox or do you see the same behaviour in
other applications as well?

 - Alexander

[Noah Slater (nslater)]

Just with firefox, nothing else does this.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

On Thu, Jul 05, 2007 at 09:47:37AM -0000, Noah Slater wrote:
> Just with firefox, nothing else does this.
>

Can you please repeat ... what element flickers for you?

 - Alexander

[Noah Slater (nslater)]

> Can you please repeat ... what element flickers for you?

When I move my cursor over a link it seems to flicker between
recognising the link or not - so the cursor moves between a normal
pointer to and hand and back while the status bar flickers the href of
the link. It seems Firefox get's confused about if the text is a link
or not and just goes back and forth.

[Xeno Campanoli (xeno)]

I have not reproduced this, but I did notice a flicker, using firefox, on the volumn pulldown from Gnome, and then there is also the gnome menu tab flicker I have from bug 123132. It looks to me from this that there are lots of flicker problems with Gnome on Gutsy.

[Xeno Campanoli (xeno)]

I just reproduced a window on/of state that might be considered a flicker. I started up the Google video page leaving the mouse in the middle of the window, and one of the links (Comedy) happened to come up under the mouse arrow, leaving it blinking the popdown menu for this link. I cannot seem to reproduce this by doing anything else on the page.

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

I haven't been able to reproduce this with over 100 tabs open.

[Xeno Campanoli (xeno)]

I don't see it anymore either. If you want to close it I suspect it's gone. If I see it again I'll certainly reopen it. Unfortunately, it has been so long that I may not be remembering about something with the reproduction context. I do remember it was browser windows and not browser tabs that did it, and that I was running at least one video when it was flashing. My apologies for the hiatus. I was trying to keep a good job (and I so far have succeeded).

[Xeno Campanoli (xeno)]

I was finally able to generate some flashing on the Guba site main menu last night by leaving the mouse on one of the image links on the right side. This is not exactly the same flashing bug I was originally seeing, but it is still interesting that there are still flashing/flickering problems with FF.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

I'm able to reproduce this on Jaunty as described in the comments above. Exact steps to reproduce for me:

1. Launch a new window opened to www.google.com (or any url with hyperlinks)
2. Hover mouse over any underlined hyperlink -- behaves normally: arrow switches to hand with finger
3. File -> New Tab ; then return to the www.google.com tab
4. Hover mouse over an underlined hyperlink
5. Notice that the cursor briefly switches from the arrow to the hand, then immediately back to an arrow. The status bar also shows the URL briefly, then goes blank.
6. Nudge mouse around over the link, and it flickers back and forth between arrow and hand

For ordinary links, it is a minor irritation. It does make the URL in the status bar unviewable, which is a usability problem. But where this really gets annoying is with javascript links, such as JS dropdown menus; it makes it very tough to select links in these menus.

This system was upgraded from Hardy (I did the upgrade to Intrepid, verified everything was working, and then went on directly to Jaunty).

I've not been able to reproduce the same flickering behavior in other apps: konqueror, xchat-gnome, evince, openoffice. konqueror works fine even with multiple tabs open.

firefox:
  Installed: 3.0.5+nobinonly-0ubuntu1
  Candidate: 3.0.5+nobinonly-0ubuntu1
  Version table:
 *** 3.0.5+nobinonly-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://se.archive.ubuntu.com jaunty/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
Description: Ubuntu jaunty (development branch) -- updated as of Jan 5th
Release: 9.04

[no2song (no2song)]

i can easily reproduce that:

open any page with a big picture link (<a><img /></a>), hover mouse over the picture then scroll the page

see the cursor flicker