Do you find that the text cursor sometimes disappears in Firefox on KDE Wayland?

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1

Do you find that the text cursor sometimes disappears in Firefox when cutting text or switching to another app and back? I would like to find out if anyone else sees the same behaviour in Firefox on KDE Wayland as I do.

Steps to reproduce:

  1. In Firefox, create an issue in JIRA or an email in Outlook, GMail or Yahoo online (and maybe other things with multiline text boxes)
  2. Write some text
  3. Switch to another application
  4. Switch back
  5. Text cursor is invisible. It can be made to reappear by switching tabs in Firefox (but this is obviously rather inconvenient to do every time).

Steps 3 and 4 can be replaced with cutting some text with the same result. The problem may not start immediately on launch but after some time using Firefox.

For me, the problem does not occur when using X11 only in Wayland and I am using the ppa not flatpak or snap. I am running KDE Plasma 5.27.10 and Firefox 124.0.2 although I’ve seen this behavior for a while now (eg. since Firefox 121).

If you do not see this problem, what version of Firefox and KDE are you using and are you using Wayland?

2

I do experience similar issues with the text cursor on LibreWolf 124.0.1-1 under Wayland, which I didn’t have in an older version (LibreWolf 105 on X11 and Plasma 5). In my case, the text cursor behaves strangely in the location bar. For instance, when selecting all text there (like when focusing it with Ctrl+L), the cursor stays in the middle of text and doesn’t disappear or move to an extremity of the selection. It can also visually “stick” in place and not move when moving it with the mouse or keys (which makes the “real cursor” functionally invisible).

I haven’t as much noticed that problem on web pages themselves, but instead in the browser’s UI.

I think it might be a Firefox bug.

3

Thanks for your reply. I raised an issue against Firefox a while back (bug id is 1873814 on Mozilla bugtracker - I cannot post a direct link) with someone else commenting that they’d seen the same thing, but presumably it isn’t a common problem otherwise I’m sure it would have far more attention. That is what I’m hoping to find out by asking here if anyone has had the same issue.

4

I also get this exact problem! I will do some testing in the near future to see if the cursor reappears when I do the things you say, and add information about my setup.

5

Were you able to test to see if the cursor reappears?

6

I haven’t noticed the issue in the past couple of weeks because I haven’t been spending so much time writing forum posts or on GitHub.

Testing briefly now, it certainly doesn’t happen every time I switch from Firefox to something else and back. I’ll have to wait till it raises its head again.

This is Firefox 124.0.2 64-bit for openSUSE on Tumbleweed 20240412, with Plasma 6.0.3 and Qt 6.7.0, on Wayland. I guess two weeks ago I was also on 124.0, probably on Plasma 6.0.2 and Qt 6.6.x – whatever Tumbleweed was on at the time.

Edit: Had it happen just now, I can confirm that switching tabs and back does make the cursor reappear for me too. Clicking on a different text field and then back on the one with the missing cursor also makes it reappear.