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Menu bar icons flickering

I'm running a dual display setup, and when I select a window on one screen, the icons on the top menu bar flicker. This happens when a window is selected on either the external monitor, or on my macbook display.


I have tried following the instructions from an earlier thread: Status icons in menu bar flickering

But it didn't fix the problem.


Any suggestions?

Posted on Oct 16, 2014 5:50 PM

Reply
5 replies

Oct 22, 2014 5:43 PM in response to speakerzzzzz

I don't think the icons are flickering but rather that the menu bar is being redrawn every time you (and I) move focus from one monitor to the other. The dark icons on the active monitor are swapped for light grey ones, and vice versa. It's quite annoying, and slows down switching between two monitors quite a lot.


Haven't found any solution anywhere but have reported in feedback to Apple.

Oct 24, 2014 8:50 PM in response to j33f

Same problem here. Multi monitor support has some serious problems in Yosemite. The flickering/redrawing status menus issue is especially annoying with the UI in dark mode, so I've been forced to turn that off, but that hasn't alleviated the problem. But I ran into an even worse bug today. All the menus of the current app (except the main one that has the same name as the app) disappear every two or three keystrokes. They will then reappear a couple keystrokes later (or whenever I use a keyboard shortcut that triggers a menu command). So my entire menubar was flickering all day at work.


It's not every app that does it. Seems to only happen in apps that have at least one menu with an icon heading instead of text. Unfortunately, both BBEdit and Outlook have an AppleScript menu (the 'S' icon), and those are where I spend most of my day…typing!


Yosemite is running really smoothly on my iMac and MacBook Air at home, so it seemed safe to upgrade. Nope. Complete disaster for me. Now I can spend the weekend downgrading to Mavericks, then wonder how long it'll be before that machine can sync with other things over iCloud, since everything else is using iCloud Drive now. Awesome.


If you use multiple monitors, don't upgrade to Yosemite. That's the only solution until Apple fixes this half baked crap.

Oct 26, 2014 6:03 PM in response to Jason Sims

While somewhat inconvenient, turning off 'Displays have separate spaces' has made an enormous difference to the way my machine is running – much, much smoother. Clearly the buggy side of things is in that area. I tend not to use full screen much anyway, rather just maximising apps in their window, so can still make use of the second monitor that way. A backward step for sure, but until they give us something better it's all we have.

Menu bar icons flickering

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