Display flickering in Safari-Retina MacBook Pro

I've been dealing with the SAME EXACT PROBLEM for the last two months. After back and forth with AppleCare for over a month, and replacing the logicboard, it was still happening! I finally got them to send me a new one. It's been fine for a couple days, and now just started happening again. I searched google afterwards and found this post. I don't know what to do at this point. For example, on yahoo's homepage, if you keep clicking the right arrow to go through the different stories... there will be flickering from the previous photo that was on there. Is this the same issue? Also sometimes in text boxes, the cursor and the last couple letters I typed will temporarily dissapear. I guess this is what happens when you buy new technology right when they it comes out, but still there's no excuse. I'm having my old laptop sent straight to an Apple Engineer, because Apple claims they've "never seen this issue before". It's honestly been a huge headache for the past couple months, not sure what to do at this point. The only things I brought over from my original computer were about 30 Word documents, and my pictures that were previously uploaded from my iPhone.

Anyone else out there have the same issues, or know a fix to this?

Hi everyone, I think that's only a software problem. My mac is affected by the same problem, and it's only on safari. On chrome (eg) there's no trace of this problem.

Hope in a software update.

Bye

I agree. It took me over 3 hours to get all my settings back to how my old one were.. since I didn't want to take the chance of doing the Time Machine backup and potentially bringing over the problem. Also, now my magic mouse is randomally disconnecting to my new computer when it was never a problem before (more B.S. i have to deal with now). I've been back in contact with the senior advisor I've been dealing with the past month, and he was told by an engineer to try Safari w/o flash installed and with only one tab open. It took about 6 hours for it to show up again. Literally a minute ago, I sent him an email with a video of it happening and showing him the adobe flash website test saying flash wasn't installed. I'm still not clear if this is a problem for everyone, or only some of us. I agree though, it has to be a software problem since other browser's like Chrome work fine. Interested to see what he replies with. I'll keep you guys posted.

I am having the same issue. I have noticed that it only happens in Safari, and in my professional opinion as a software engineer, it is a software issue with Safari. I would say that the problem is due to the way that Safari handles scaling web sites to the high resolution display.

I have not tried this, but one could test this by switching the display resolution to "scaled for more space" in preferences. For the uninitiated, this will turn the "retina display" graphics scaling off, and give you the same 1:1 resolution you would get on a standard Mac display. That may turn off the scaling feature in Safari, and prevent the flickering issue. I would, however, not be surprised if it did not fix the issue.

Hopefully, to allay any/everyone's concerns, when an issue happens in a particular piece of software, but not in every piece of software then it is likely an issue with only that piece of software. I would not allow the Geniuses to replace your hardware in that case. You may end up spinning your wheels with no resolution to the issue.

For this I would just wait for the next release of Safari (as much of a pain in the behind as that is).

I also noticed this happens only in Safari, particularlly with mouse-over events or typing in divs like in gmail or in this forum. I tried switching to scaled resolution "looks like 1920 x 1200" and still saw the flicker when I immediately tabbed back to safari. It's like the safari is having issues updating divs relative to the cursor - mouse or while typing. It's happening now as I type this message - can't see the text as the last few words seem to get covered up by the state of the div that was there before I was typing. For example, if I'm typing in an empty div, it flickers with an empty div. If I'm inserting text in a paragraph, it flickers with the text that was there before I started typing.

Upside is that Firefox looks less grainy at this resolution (but is still grainy if you look closely). Hoping that a Safari update addresses the issue. My eyes are straining at this fine resolution...

I've been experiencing flickering on Facebook as well. Here's what I recorded.

I do not get it using Chrome:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-0oGizc0fw

Yes, the issue appears to only occur with Safari. I noticed you are using Safari in your video. The issue is with how Safari's implementation of WebKit is scaling web pages. Chrome likely implements WebKit differently, which is why the issue does not appear there even though both browsers use the same core rendering engine.

Once Apple acknowledges the issue there should be a new release of Safari.

I think I solved the problem by randomly noticing that Cody Krieger's gfxcardstatus (http://gfx.io) was not running in my menu bar as usual (don't remember quiting the app). I activated it again forcing the use of the discrete GPU and since then everything runs fine. I confirmed the issue is with Intel's Graphics HD 4000 by activating it through the app and noticing the flickering in Safari.

So, if you are still having problems with that try and download gfxcardstatus.

yeah sorry for not getting back to you guys about this.. my Senior Advisor filled me in and let me know that my MacBook retina I sent in for the engineers to checkout is Case 1 for the whole project of finding a fix and that their will be a fix in an update in the future... so you're welcome! haha

I've since been having disconnect issues with my Magic Mouse though... can't seem to win with this notebook

I've been experiencing this as well in Safari, however my laptop is the new 2012 MacBook Pro (non-retina). Seems that this isn't limited to just the Retina displays and that it's likely a major bug in Safari. Other browsers such as Chrome and Firefox work perfectly.

It would be great if Apple would fix this asap. In this day and age it's difficult to understand how something like this can make it through testing and get out into the wilds.

For the record: same issue here with an MacBook Pro 2.3 Ghz i7 (non-retina). Rendering of text in graphics goes wrong using the Intel 4000 graphic card and Safari. Flickering while editing text, parts of text seem to disapear althought it's technically still there.

Edit: funny enough, while editing the post it showed up at the moment I hitted the 'OK' button:

Same thing is happening on my MacBook Pro, 2.2 Ghz I7. Obviously a software issue. I hope Apple fixes it soon -- more annoying than anything. While typing this text it starts flickering in and out of existence. Hope it doesn't get worse!