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started on V15: selecting a field with prefilled text, the cursor is always BLACK vs. the text color, so if field happens to be black... the cursor is invisible

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see what i mean on keystone.skyrun.com. click on the search box (right, just below the top) that has the prefilled in text 'search...'.

cursor is there, but virtually invisible until you start typing. this works fine on ff v14- or all versions of ie.

see what i mean on keystone.skyrun.com. click on the search box (right, just below the top) that has the prefilled in text 'search...'. cursor is there, but virtually invisible until you start typing. this works fine on ff v14- or all versions of ie.

All Replies (5)

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This appears to be related to a change in the way Firefox 15 handles the placeholder text. As soon as you type any character, both the "I-bar" and your typed text show in a contrasting color, but until then, no.


To see what I mean, you could strip the placeholder text from that box using a script. This is just for illustration and not a very useful way to browse the web. If it's your site, you could something like this onfocus.

(1) Open the web console by pressing Ctrl+Shift+k

(2) Copy the following line of script and paste it next to the caret (>) and press Enter to run it:


document.querySelector("input[placeholder]").removeAttribute("placeholder");

(3) Click in the box, you should get a white "I-bar"

(4) You can close the web console by pressing Ctrl+Shift+k again


The change of keeping the placeholder text there until you type something isn't going to be changed, but maybe they can fix the insertion point color issue somehow. Certainly it would be useful if the placeholder text was readable.

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I added a comment on this bug with a link to this thread:

Bug 769405 No caret appears in an empty <input> if placeholder is defined
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=769405#c14

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Are you using a Firefox or Windows theme that makes the text background black?

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i'm using ff out of the box on windows 7.

pls see my website link and you'll see what i'm talking about. the theme doesn't matter, the cursor is always black if there is a placeholder, so if the website has a black background and there is a placeholder in the field (even a white field), the cursor is still black. seems to be pretty clearly a bug not honoring the text color of the input field NOR the placeholder.

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I revisited the bug linked above and voted for it to be fixed.