I’ve had an issue in Safari since Tahoe, and I’m afraid Golden Gate has failed to clear it. The video demonstrates it but essentially Safari, low on the screen fails to register clicks but does when I move it up the screen. Thoughts welcome…
Wow, that IS bizarre. I’m thinking you may have a Safari extension that’s interfering with mouse clicks in certain regions?
My first thought is that there might be a cookie banner across the bottom of the screen but an ad blocker (or bug in Safari) is hiding the content, but not an invisible fixed element that is intercepting clicks. Have you tried right-clicking and then choosing “inspect element” (or whatever Safari calls it) to see if it looks the same before and after you scroll?
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I have not seen the behavior you demonstrate in my Tahoe Safari. But I get the strong impression something might be interfering with your button clicks, perhaps related to an extension or filtering? I would suggest doing a Reload Without Content Blockers (ctrl-cmd-r) to see if that has any effect.
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Definitely sounds like there’s some invisible object down there that’s receiving the mouse click.
It could be a partially-removed bit of blocked content (as @ron wrote).
It could also be some wonky liquid glass UI element. Like a horizontal scroll-bar that only shows itself under some circumstances.
That may be the best “request for help” video I’ve seen. Unfortunately, I’m in a mind with the others who’ve already posted. Something is getting those clicks. Something that wants clicks, but is happy to pass the hover event along. My first thought was the ghost of a widget, but you say it only happens in Safari, so that seems unlikely. I’m assuming you’ve tested that by putting something from another app in the same place on the screen and seeing normal behavior? But if you haven’t already tried it, there should be no harm in running killall NotificationCenter, other than restarting all the widgets you currently have. It will reveal whether there may be a widget ghost lurking in that spot.
Off-the-wall suggestion:
What happens if you go back to the page in your video above, and go up to the Safari tool bar and choose “hide distracting items” ??
If there is something “invisible” blocking the button (as others seem to suggest), perhaps it will be revealed when you do this…
Thanks guys, all very useful and along lines I had thought, I probably wasn’t clear but this happens on every webpage. Including this one. Just tried to select text in this box as I type and it won’t let me…. A couple of frustrated clicks later… it lets me. Aaarrghh…
For extensions I only have Agenda, Notion, DevonTHINK and Proton Pass as active extensions, the others are all bound into apps and I can’t uninstall them without removing the app, they are inactive though. I did have Wipr and 1Block and had removed them earlier.
I did try Inspect Element and scrolling, no immediately spotted difference as Ron suggested and Simon’s Reload Without Content Blockers (useful info) still had the same issue. No changes with Jeff’s killall… J.Albert’s suggestion on hiding distracting items turns out to be great fun and I can’t wait to freak my students out with that. However on the example I used it revealed the long container for that one button and it went with it, no other element hiding it.
I’ve filed a bug report with Apple with a lengthier video.
Have you looked at Safari’s Page Inspector or whatever it’s called (I am using Firefox, which calls it Web Developer Tools). You get a browser window pane at the bottom with the code of the page, and when you mouse over the code of the page the related page element is highlighted. This might help ID what the problematic part is, but as it’s occurring across sites, might not be useful.
Safari on the iPhone/Pad has a very long list buried in its Settings of ‘Feature Flags’ (formerly ‘experimental features’), maybe it is also there in macOS. Maybe something new was activated that is causing this. You could try taking a few minutes and turn all of the Flags off, or the ones that have vaguely decipherable names that might be related, off and see if that helps.
That’s all I can think of now, hope it helps.
