Textbox caret stops blinking after a few seconds
In the past the caret in text entry fields used to blink/pulsate/flash forever in both Firefox and Thunderbird. (Text entry boxes, such as the browser URL-bar, the e-mail To/Subject/Content textboxes, online forms, etc.). Now in the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox 110.0.1 and Thunderbird 102.8.0 the caret stops blinking after just a few seconds. This is very confusing and frustrating for my grandmother and she already called me several times because Firefox and Thunderbird 'stopped working'. I explained to her that this is a new feature but she does not understand and keeps forgetting it after a few days. She is used to the cared blinking continuously, it has been blinking for the past decades whenever she wanted to type something in the computer and it only stopped blinking when the computer program froze or crashed.
I am sure that my grandma is not the only person having issues with the caret not flashing, I for one also would like to have a caret that blinks forever, so when I look away from the screen and look back I do not have to search the text to find where I left my caret.
Please make it so that the default caret appearance and behavior is the same as in all other programs (i.e. blinking forever), as it used to be in the past, just like what everyone is used to. I argue that the majority of users is used to and also expects a blinking caret when they are writing an e-mail or search online and you are confusing a whole lot of people with this minor change, people who do not know how to report bugs or seek help themselves. It's a sign of poor user-friendliness if grandmas need to call their grandchildren or children for help just to write e-mails which they used to be able to do on their own for many years in the past.
I hereby suggest adding an accessibility option for people who wish to disable the blinking cursor and to change the default behavior back to 'caret flashing forever'.
Chosen solution
This is about the caretBlinkCount.
You can create a new Number pref on the about:config page and set the pref to a high value like 1000000
- ui.caretBlinkCount = 1000000
Paste ui.caretBlinkCount in the search at the top of the about:config page, select the Number radio button, click the '+' to add the new pref, type its value, click the blue OK button or press the Enter key to confirm.
You can open the about:config page via the location/address bar. On the warning page, you can click "Accept the Risk and Continue" to open about:config.
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Chosen Solution
This is about the caretBlinkCount.
You can create a new Number pref on the about:config page and set the pref to a high value like 1000000
- ui.caretBlinkCount = 1000000
Paste ui.caretBlinkCount in the search at the top of the about:config page, select the Number radio button, click the '+' to add the new pref, type its value, click the blue OK button or press the Enter key to confirm.
You can open the about:config page via the location/address bar. On the warning page, you can click "Accept the Risk and Continue" to open about:config.
Does this work for you to solve your question ?
This solution makes the cursor blink indefinitely, so thank you very much. But honestly this is not really a solution for the users who think their Firefox or Thunderbird is unresponsive. It's not a user friendly solution to go though the about:config page and it should be default behavior or at least be an option in the normal text composition settings of Firefox and Thunderbird.
As you can see on this page of the Firefox source code, there are quite a few 'ui' pref available for all kinds of settings and support them via Settings would only cause confusion apart from having to explain what they are about and in what cases they are useful and changing such prefs can have negative effects and you likely do not remember having changed them. I had to dig the source for quite some time to locate this pref and test how if/how this works.
WARNING: modifying prefs directly via the about:config page can sometimes break Firefox or cause strange behavior, and there is no guarantee that this will keep working in future Firefox releases, so be cautious with modifying prefs if you aren't sure you understand their purpose. You should only do this if you know what you're doing.