Found a solution for the macOS MouseCursor/Hover/FocusLoss/ContextMenu Bug!

[seakrebel]

Another one that I can confirm: Rectangle / Rectangle Pro

 

[izzy0242mr]

- Open two different app windows
- Left-click to activate one window (e.g. Finder)
- Right-click on the other non-activated app window this opens the context menu (e.g. Safari)
- Close the context menu by clicking outside of it and don't select any context menu option

Someone else mentioned iPhone Mirroring being the culprit. I followed these steps and wasn't noticing any "hover" issues. Not 100% clear what that means, but here's what happened after I closed the context menu by clicking outside of it:

- "Finder" remains the active application per the menubar
- If I move my mouse over other elements inside Safari (i.e., my bookmarks bar), they do highlight. But if I mouse over like a URL or something, the status bar doesn't pop up like it would if Safari was the active app.

I have never owned an iPhone and so have never used iPhone Mirroring.

 

[seakrebel]

Another one that causes this issue: Raycast (v2, idk about earlier versions)

 

[royn]

Someone else mentioned iPhone Mirroring being the culprit. I followed these steps and wasn't noticing any "hover" issues. Not 100% clear what that means, but here's what happened after I closed the context menu by clicking outside of it:

- "Finder" remains the active application per the menubar
- If I move my mouse over other elements inside Safari (i.e., my bookmarks bar), they do highlight. But if I mouse over like a URL or something, the status bar doesn't pop up like it would if Safari was the active app.

I have never owned an iPhone and so have never used iPhone Mirroring.

The window in which you want to Hover must be "active". What happens when the bug is occurring is with the window active, click anywhere in the window, hover stops working in the active window... AFAIK hover on inactive windows doesnt work at all... (not sure if this is new or just for me, but its been like this for a while on macos - ridiculous, I know)

 

[izzy0242mr]

The window in which you want to Hover must be "active". What happens when the bug is occurring is with the window active, click anywhere in the window, hover stops working in the active window... AFAIK hover on inactive windows doesnt work at all... (not sure if this is new or just for me, but its been like this for a while on macos - ridiculous, I know)

I need to a see a video of this. What is meant by "hover"? Because when I am in a Finder window (Finder active), right click in Safari side by side, click out of context menu in Safari (Finder remains active per menubar), and then move my mouse back into Finder window and hover over things like buttons, the little pop-ups describing what the buttons do still appear. That's me "hovering" my cursor inside the "active" window (Finder) despite having done the behavior the OP was saying to do.

 

[comfybonfire]

Hey all, wanted to share a fix for the macOS hover bug that's been driving me crazy for over three months.

On my end, the main symptoms were hover interactions randomly breaking system-wide (browsers, Notification Center, etc.). A temporary fix that worked for seconds/minutes: triggering Mission Control (three-finger swipe up and back) or moving the cursor to the desktop. Obviously, extremely annoying to have to do this every few seconds...

What I tried that did NOT fix it:
- Uninstalling Arc, Dia, Comet, Bartender, BetterDisplay, etc.
- Cleaning Library folders (Preferences, LaunchAgents, Caches, Application Support)
- Unplugging external monitor

🚨 After 30+hrs of troubleshooting, the culprit was Apple's iPhone Mirroring app.

The app was running background hooks at the system input level that were corrupting hover state. The tell was seeing it flicker in the menu bar.

Fix:
1. Open the iPhone Mirroring app on your mac and revoke access to your iPhone
2. Go to System Settings > AirDrop & Continuity > iPhone Mirroring and turn off iPhone Widgets
3. Go to Notifications & Live Activities and confirm "Allow notifications from iPhone" and "Allow Live Activities from iPhone" are both off
4. Confirm no processes are running: ps aux | grep -i "iphone\|mirroring" | grep -v grep
5. Check LaunchAgents are clear: ls ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ | grep -i iphone
6. Lastly, ensure to turn off iPhone Mirroring on your iPhone too

After doing this, hover has been working perfectly.

Hope this saves someone the weeks of troubleshooting I went through. 🙏

thank you so much. I had to reboot after following your step but once I did, the issue was completely gone!