Weird bug - Firefox 4, Stylish, or Mefi?

April 11, 2011 11:32 PM

Is this weird bug in the preview box being caused by the Stylish script I'm using, by Firefox 4, or something else?

I uploaded the video here at Youtube. You'll notice that as my mouse moves up and down in the text box, the link color in the preview box (for both the link and my username) flashes back and forth between unvisited (the bright yellow) and visited (the brownish-maroon). Note that I am using the change visited link color Stylish script that Plutor made for me because I was having trouble discerning the visited links from plain text. (It's obvious that I'm also using the Better Contrast script.) If it is the script, can you fix it?

posted by IndigoRain to Bugs at 11:32 PM (16 comments total)

I'm on Firefox 4 on OS X 10.6.6 and the same thing happens when I have links in the preview box. I'm not using any userscripts.
posted by auto-correct at 12:23 AM on April 12, 2011

I trust you have purchased a metafilter premium support subscription...
posted by ryanrs at 12:51 AM on April 12, 2011 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure what could be causing that. I definitely haven't seen that before and I can't duplicate it with Firefox 4. You can pretty quickly eliminate Stylish as the cause by disabling it temporarily. See if you get the same behavior. If you still have changing link colors in preview after disabling Stylish you can start looking elsewhere. If you don't, you can try selectively disabling your userstyles.

But honestly I have no idea how a userstyle could be playing a part here. It looks more like an add-on or program related to your cursor. Something that illuminates the text directly under your pointer, perhaps? It looks like the text was getting darker as you moved the mouse up. Perhaps you could isolate when the color change happens. Is it as you move up/away from the preview area?
posted by pb (staff) at 1:18 AM on April 12, 2011

I'm not using Stylish, but I am using FF4 with mefiquote and mefinavigator greasemonkey scripts installed, and I get this too. It only seems to happen as I am mousing around in the text box, and stops as soon as the mouse cursor leaves it.

I will disable them and see if it goes away.
posted by ArgentCorvid at 5:56 AM on April 12, 2011

With greasemonkey totally disabled, it still does it.

I have nothing else installed that would mess with links on a page.

I'm trying to remember if my computer at home does it too.
posted by ArgentCorvid at 6:01 AM on April 12, 2011

it definitely does this it at home.

Bug in Firefox?
posted by ArgentCorvid at 10:55 AM on April 12, 2011

It might be a bug in Firefox, but I can't reproduce it. Do you have the same extensions installed at home and at work? Do you still see the problem if you start in Safe Mode? I'm guessing it's glitch with an extension or a peculiar OS setting since this doesn't seem widespread.
posted by pb (staff) at 11:26 AM on April 12, 2011

I see this, too (and have for at least a few weeks--never thought much of it before). I'm using Firefox 4 with AdBlock Plus and Xmarks. Not using any scripts or anything.

It doesn't appear to affect anything...just a cosmetic issue. In preview, clicked links go from [clicked link color] to [unclicked link color] as I move my mouse; stop moving the mouse and they return to [clicked link color]. It's doing it for my username right now. Wheeeee!
posted by phunniemee at 1:53 PM on April 12, 2011

It happens to me in Firefox 4/Windows 7 even starting in safe mode. It's kind of freaky. For me it flickers regardless of mousing direction.
posted by donnagirl at 3:22 PM on April 12, 2011

same here, FF4 on windows XP, Vista and 7, regardless of extensions/safe mode. I didn't notice it until the upgrade to 4.
posted by ArgentCorvid at 5:29 PM on April 12, 2011

That's really weird. I also see it happen with Greasemonkey and Stylish completely turned off. I don't have any add-ons or Windows accessibility tools that would illuminate the text under my pointer or anything like that. Must be a FF4 thing.
posted by IndigoRain at 6:57 PM on April 12, 2011

aha! I was finally able to see this (sort of). I used View -> Zoom In to make the preview area as big as my screen. Then as I moved my mouse in the textarea I saw links that were the visited link color flicker slightly. It wasn't as pronounced as in the video but there was definitely a flicker there.

On my monitor, the flicker only happened for the visited link color. So I set the live preview to show all links as the new link color on Firefox 4 only. That might help. It eliminated the problem for me, but like I said the problem was hardly noticeable for me.
posted by pb (staff) at 8:46 AM on April 13, 2011

This seems to have "fixed" the "problem" for me.
posted by ArgentCorvid at 11:06 AM on April 13, 2011

How would I go about doing this, pb?
posted by IndigoRain at 11:07 PM on April 13, 2011

It's already done for you in Firefox 4. Sounds like that change didn't fix it for you, sorry about that. I'm not sure there's anything more we can do on this end.
posted by pb (staff) at 5:40 AM on April 14, 2011

Ohhh, okay. Thanks.
posted by IndigoRain at 6:46 PM on April 14, 2011