Mouse pointer flickers in Firefox?

[ander111]

Hi guys,

I'm not sure this is the best place to ask about this, but I'll give it a shot.

I've just installed Mint 14 XFCE on my son's PC. He's complaining that when he uses his mouse wheel to scroll in Firefox, his mouse pointer keeps flickering.

I tried it, and it seems like FF is deliberately hiding the mouse pointer during scrolling. I can see why that'd make sense—after all, when you're scrolling, you're looking at content, not at the mouse pointer. But this behaviour doesn't happen in FF under Mint 14 Cinnamon, nor in Windows 7... So is it possible it's an XFCE issue?

Do you know if there's any way to keep FF from hiding the mouse pointer while scrolling? Or is it an XFCE-wide setting of some kind? In FF, we've tried enabling/disabling Smooth Scrolling and Hardware Acceleration, but they had no effect.

Thanks, Ander

[catweazel]

his mouse wheel to scroll in Firefox, his mouse pointer keeps flickering.

http://bit.ly/Y33u4U

[ander111]

http://bit.ly/Y33u4U

Yes, very clever. (The link points to a sarcastic "Let me Google that for you" page.) We spent half an hour searching about this before I posted here. If you'd rather not help, just do us both a favour and move on to another topic.

[catweazel]

<shrug>
The solution is right there.

[ander111]

Are you referring to disabling Flash? We already tried that; it didn't work.

If you don't want to help, that's fine. Otherwise, I'd appreciate it if you'd either be specific about the fix or point me to the actual page where it's described. Thanks.

[ander111]

Okay, it wasn't XFCE. I tried Mint 14 XFCE, Cinnamon and Mate on my PC (from a live USB) and they didn't flicker—and they all did flicker on my son's PC.

Then I remembered my son's PC has an Nvidia graphics card—and that in Linux, you have to install the Nvidia drivers separately. So we did that. Now, not only is the flickering mouse pointer gone, but everything is nice and fast and smooth.

In case anyone else needs to install the Nvidia drivers (which you should do only if you have an Nvidia graphics card!), here's the easy way we found:

1. Open a Terminal window (Menu > Terminal) and type this command in it:

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get install nvidia-current

2.Press Enter and wait for the installation to finish. (There are a couple of places where everything pauses for a while; be sure to wait till the original command prompt returns.)

3. Restart your PC (Menu > Quit > Restart).