What's going on with my Gmail cursor?

June 4, 2006 2:07 PM

What's going on with my Gmail cursor?

About a week ago, my gmail cursor seemed to have developed a vestigal limb:



It doesn't appear in any other textarea form elements. Has this happened to any/everyone else? What gives? It's a minor annoyance and it simply shall not stand!

posted by TonyRobots to computers & internet (19 comments total)

Oh, this in in Firefox 1.5.0.4. Just checked IE, and it's not doing it. Maybe related to recent Firefox update?
posted by TonyRobots at 2:09 PM on June 4, 2006

Drat, I've found the answer. It's related to Gmail's new ability to deal with right-to-left languages. It's the "bidi" (bi-directional) cursor, used to show you which direction the next letter is going to appear in, on pages that support more than one language type.

Thanks, AskMe!
posted by TonyRobots at 2:11 PM on June 4, 2006

See also:

http://metatalk.metafilter.com/mefi/11646

Wow, it's like my very own blog...
posted by TonyRobots at 2:16 PM on June 4, 2006

I never knew what this was either, but now that you found a name for it, I googled up this:

If you don't want the bi-di cursor just type "about:config" in your address bar and scroll down to "bidi.support" and change the value from "1" to "0" and it will change back to the regular up-down bar. (src)

posted by misterbrandt at 2:18 PM on June 4, 2006

Hey, I never knew that - thanks!
posted by PuGZ at 2:19 PM on June 4, 2006

I spent minutes trying to get the piece of dust I thought was on my screen off. Now I know. Thanks.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 2:36 PM on June 4, 2006

Changing the bidi.support option doesn't help. It seems to be a known bug.
posted by TonyRobots at 2:49 PM on June 4, 2006

I know it's a feature/bug ... yet I still can't stop trying to get the piece of dust off my screen. Can't wait until that's fixed. Thanks for asking this question.
posted by theredpen at 2:59 PM on June 4, 2006

The Bugzilla bug
posted by smackfu at 3:09 PM on June 4, 2006

Yeah, how many times have I hit delete to get rid of that apostrophe? Thanks!
posted by salvia at 4:29 PM on June 4, 2006

Thanks from me, too. I've tried to scrape it off my screen multiple times.
posted by jdl at 4:58 PM on June 4, 2006

This comes up on Wikipedia too, btw. The bug seems pretty old.
posted by bonaldi at 5:26 PM on June 4, 2006

Johnny I did the same thing!
posted by radioamy at 6:39 PM on June 4, 2006

Oh, wow—I always wondered why the cursor did that on certain pages!

This is why I love AskMefi.
posted by limeonaire at 9:34 PM on June 4, 2006

It sure is weird how it comes and goes. I haven't seen it on Meta in a long time but just noticed it on GMail last week.
posted by Mitheral at 7:08 AM on June 5, 2006

You just noticed it on GMail because they just added support for right-to-left languages.
posted by event at 12:11 PM on June 5, 2006

lol, thx

that's been bugging me too, the config tweak worked for me
posted by BillyG at 1:59 PM on June 5, 2006

I swear it worked initially, then on next opportunity (and every time since), it is back to the quirky mouse. Sorry about that.
posted by BillyG at 12:22 PM on June 6, 2006

event writes "You just noticed it on GMail because they just added support for right-to-left languages."

Bastards! :)
posted by Mitheral at 5:28 AM on June 7, 2006