Safari screen glitch/flicker on older MacBook Pro with Yosemite

Question

Safari screen glitch/flicker on older MacBook Pro with Yosemite

Occasionally, I'm getting a screen glitch/flicker in Safari. Usually affecting all or part of the upper left quadrant of the Safari window. Looks like mostly black with a few white dots in it, various height bars of blackness interspersed with unaffected parts of the page/window. As I move my mouse cursor around the page/window, it flickers in/out or on/off. Page functionality seems unaffected, though it's highly distracting. Somehow it seems connected to when my cursor rolls over text that is hot linked to another page, though again I can't be sure. I would include a screenshot, but of course when I try to make it happen, I can't replicate it.

Used to only happen when I was on the Google News page (news.google.com), but now it is happening on other pages. Doesn't always happen, but it happens regularly. A refresh of the page may or may not solve the problem temporarily. A quit/restart of Safari seems to help for a while, as does a full shut down / restart of the computer. But it always seems to come back.

I believe this issue started sometime after I upgraded to Yosemite. I do not recall having the issue under Mavericks, but I can't be sure.

App Store says "no updates available" as of 3/4/2015, 3:00pm EST.

Yosemite 10.10.2

MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010)

2.4 GHz intel Core i5

8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3

Intel HD Graphics 288 MB

Safari Version 8.0.3 (10600.3.18)

MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2010), OS X Yosemite (10.10.2), Safari 8.0.3

Posted on Mar 4, 2015 12:13 PM

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Answer 1

Mar 7, 2015 12:42 PM in response to Wags Wags Wags

Finally got some screen captures: (see notes below images)

Screen with glitch 1 (white rectangles with random dots of pixels, along with adjacent black boxes is 'glitch')

Screen with Glitch 2: (note differences from image 1 center right - last column of games is affected)

I only moved the mouse around the screen for this change to take place.

The only clicks I did were to use Grab to take these screenshots.

Sometimes the screen flickers between states even when the mouse is not moving.

Sometimes moving the mouse changes the areas that are flickering.

In this case both were true:

- the screen was flickering when I took the screenshot

AND

- when I moved the mouse the glitches would change.

Same page after a refresh (just hit the reload button on the safari bar)

Notes:

This is the first time this has happened on this site.

Yes, I play flash games.

Yes, I had just finished playing a flash game when I noticed the glitch.

No, I'm not sure one way or the other if the glitch is related to flash or not.

Yes, it has happened on other sites. I will try to get another screen capture if/when it happens.

The only applications that were running were Safari and iTunes (as you can see from the bottom of the screen).

There was only one Safari window open and you can see it had two tabs.

As you can see, large chunks of the screen were unaffected.

Anyone else seen anything like this? Thanks for your help.

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Answer 2

Mar 7, 2015 9:26 PM in response to Wags Wags Wags

More screen grabs. I had just watched an episode of 'Fringe' on Netflix when the issue popped up again.

Netflix Glitch 1

Netflix Glitch 2 (same page after having moved the mouse around and scrolling the page up and down)

Netflix, no Glitch (after refreshing the page)

I saw something in another post about this particular model of MacBook Pro (15", mid-2010) re: Energy Saver, graphics mode switching, and a possibly faulty graphics card. Anyone know if this could be related to that? Thanks again.

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Answer 3

Apr 8, 2015 6:52 AM in response to Wags Wags Wags

I have the exact same issue (15-inch rMBP, early 2013) running Yosemite 10.10.2.

As far as I can recall, it started after upgrading from Mavericks.

Safari tabs (not all of them when having multiple tabs open) flicker and glitch like the screenshots from OP.

Happens on several different pages/sites.

Happens mostly when/after playing video files (VLC and/or BluRay Player App) and then switching back to Safari triggers the glitch.

But also noticed recently it happens even after restart and no video playing.

Could be related to Flash or CSS, or a hardware issue with the graphics card?

On a side note - I've also experienced a lot of kernel panics and instant shut downs after the upgrade, however I don't think it's related (disabling FileVault seems to have fixed this particular problem).

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