You can try to click on the search bar or the location bar to set focus to another element.

You can also try to close the current tab and maybe other tabs as well to see if that makes it stop.

I've seen it a few times after using bookmarklets and one of those suggestions usually works for me.

Nope, doesn't work. I suspect it's either Flash or pictures with links, but if FF can't handle Youtube or images...well. I understand some websites run dodgy script, but my usage is pretty mainstream and I don't think any major browser should still be buggy when handling these sites.

I've only seen this when a page was coded to make the link text bold when the mouse hovered over it. This caused the position of the link to change and no longer be hovered, so the link went back to regular style, at which point it was under the mouse pointer again. Back and forth it went.

But enough about my problems. Can you post a link to a page that has the problem you are encountering and explain how to reproduce it?

It isn't triggered by any particular pages or technologies - it's apparently random and affecting 10 - 20% of page loads.

The bug appears to be focus related and can be negated in about 80% of instances by hovering over a link in another new window or tab. The other 20% of the time it can only be cleared by rebooting.

I work for a WebDev co. We've had to drop it as our development browser, and are recommending clients away from it for the time being. It's a major pain in the arse since we make so much use of some of the design related extensions in FF.

Hi,

I have intermittently experienced a flickering cursor similar to the original poster for the last 2 years or so, in many different version of Firefox.

Whenever the cursor changes from the normal pointer to something else (ie: the 'I' symbol when hovering over text or the finger symbol when hovering over a button, the mouse will flicker between the pointer and the modified pointer (I or hand) every pixel it moves, eg: 30 times a second.

I use AdBlock Plus, IEtabplus and have used several different mouse guesture plugins over the years but always get this issue. Closing the browser with all the tabs and reloading it fixes the issue for a while, until it happens again, usually several hours of heavy browsing later. I have set up my tab navigation using the mouse gestures plugin, so that I can move between tabs by holding the right click button and moving the scroll wheel up or down. I don't know if this causes the problem because a 'mouse-click-release' gets lost from one tab and moves to another.

I also seem to correlate the problem with the website www.netvibes.com (a javascript heavy RSS aggregation service like iGoogle), although once the problem occurs it will persists even after closing netvibes and all tabs.

Anyway, it is a minor issue but very distracting and annoying that it has been going on for so long. It doesn't happen in any other browsers.

Cheers,

Ian

http://gadgetme.info/mouse-pointer-flickers-blinks-or-disappears-in-web-browser.htm

Confirmed in:

Ubuntu 10.10 x86, Kubuntu 10.04 x86, Linux Mint 10 Gnome x86, Windows XP x86,

Same problem with erratic cursor upon hovering over a link. My Home Page is a simple HTML text page with about 20 links. Mouse cursor movement is fine until I pass over a link, then it's erratic for a short time. I can't use Firefox on my netbook (desktop installations are fine) due to this problem.

Do you have CSS code that is triggered by hovering a link (a:hover)?