Sprayfly

Over the last week or so, I became aware that when I clicked on text on a webpage in Firefox (version 2.0.0.3), I was left with a blinking cursor flashing at that point - as if I was in a word processor. This isn’t such a problem but I became increasingly aware of it and it started to become an annoyance - especially on Ajax pages where it makes things look faulty. If the text size is large then you can get massive cursors flashing at you! See the screenshot below:

I searched around and eventually found this website which proposes a solution. It turns out that this blinking cursor is actually a feature of firefox, called caret browsing and that it can be toggled on and off using the F7 key. Interestingly, Firefox prompts you when you want to turn Caret browsing on… yet I cannot remember ever seeing this prompt box before - which leaves me intrigued as to how it turned on in the first place on my computer.

Caret browsing can be a useful feature if you wish to select and manipulate text all via the keyboard - but for general web browsing it is best turned off. For a start, it makes scrolling a webpage using the keyboard arrows very very twitchy! Glad I’ve got to the bottom of this one anyway. Thanks to Rishi ‘Beyond-Teck’.