cursor disappears in Firefox on OSX 10.6.8

[musicman691]

I have a couple of Macs here one of which is my combo internet/Photoshop machine (Mac mini 4,1 with 8 gig ram, 2.4 GHz core 2 duo) running OSX 10.6.8. An interesting thing has started happening a few months back and it's not consistent - there are some times the cursor disappears when surfing the net inside Firefox (first started in FF26 and continued on to F46 which I just got this week). Size of the cursor doesn't matter as I tried setting it large in OSX prefs and I'm not losing site of it in the page clutter - it completely disappears. If I move the mouse around and to where I think the cursor is off the page and on the desktop if I click a mouse button it become visible. Problem is it's not consistent but it does seem to happen the most on pages with Flash animation or video. Could this be the issue? Doesn't happen on the same page in Safari or at any other time I'm using this machine.

Also sometimes happens on Youtube as well.

[stubbsonic]

My cursor disappears from time to time in Safari and sometimes in DP. I can usually do something like change apps and back and then it reappears.

[mikehalloran]

I almost never use Firefox but did for the first time in quite awhile—latest build in El Cap—same issue. I moved my cursor to another monitor—it reappeared and worked correctly in FF when I moved it back.

I do remember it being a common issue before I went with Chrome.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I searched but couldn't find any app to return the cursor to the center of the main screen. I thought there was one... I must be mistaken, but it would be a nice thing to have. In El Cap you can "shake" your finger on the pointing device and the cursor get gigantic. Great feature and always seems to find the cursor. Won't help the o/p but might help someone in the future.

[musicman691]

So I'm not the only one afflicted by this problem. I never had the cursor disappear in DP but because of the screen resolution and base cursor size on my daw iMac I had to enlarge the cursor just a bit. The odd time or two I've had my daw on the 'net I've never had this issue in FF (any version).

[mikehalloran]

If you hadn't started the thread, I would not have rememberd seeing it a few days ago. I was downloading Overture 5 beta and it kept failing with one second to go—so I switched browsers to see if that would do it. The download took much longer in FireFox but was successful. The cursor disappeared on me and shaking it didn't work to make it visible !?!?!

My job uses SalesForce and GoogleDocs and I often have to search 800 page .pdfs online that change every few days. Chrome is just so much better (searching in a second where FF would take 20 minutes) but it is still 32bit. This means that there is an odd site or two where Firefox, Opera or even Safari is better. Ok, almost never Safari...

Anyway, before Chrome, I used Firefox and the disappearing cursor was a regular occurrence. That was in 2010 and OS 10.6. Swiping my trackpad to the right would make it appear in that monitor and moving it back kept it visible. I remembered that the other night.

Besides the superior performance, another thing about Chrome is that you can place trouble tickets under the Tools menu. Chrome updates to the latest build every time you fire it up. If I report an issue in the morning, this is usually fixed in a couple of hours.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Adobe CS5.5 Photoshop also has cursor issues. Seriously, a "center cursor to main screen" macro sure would be nice.

[musicman691]

Adobe CS5.5 Photoshop also has cursor issues. Seriously, a "center cursor to main screen" macro sure would be nice.

Agreed but I've not had it completely disappear in Photoshop. With the small size and shape of some of the cursors in PS it can get lost amongst the picture being edited - it just blends in. What would be good is to have the cursor somehow automatically change color to a contrasting color of the picture are being edited.