Gmail in Safari. Glitch Out!

[supersim65]

I've stumbled across some kind of glitch an I was wondering if anyone could shed light on it. Here are the symptoms...

Macbook Pro 17"
OSX 10.6.5
Safari 5.0.3

The whole page in Safari will go a bit insane (see pictures, glitching images change every half a second or so) whenever I click on the 'reply' text box when reading an email. As soon as the text cursor loads, glitch out. Interesting symptoms are that this happens sporadically, 3 times in 3 months, and although it recurs after refreshing the page, restarting Safari, or restarting the computer, it passes with time. Also interesting, when I went to take a full screen screenshot (alt+cmd+3) the computer produced a fully black image (makes a convenient black background incidentally) although when taking a partial screenshot (alt+cmd+4) it works fine.

I'm bemused and frustrated. No problems with Firefox.

 

[supersim65]

Whoops, forgot to attach...

Excuse poor quality...

 

[wrldwzrd89]

Now that is very odd. Could be a graphics card issue, a bug in Safari, a bug in an extension you have installed, or something else I haven't thought of.

Some tips to try:
Disable extensions temporarily.
Clear the cache.
Test in other browsers (Firefox, Chrome, etc.)

 

[nate8nate]

I agree that it looks like a graphics card issue, I'm guessing it has to do with the dynamic switching of graphics cards.

 

[supersim65]

Found a solution this morning, don't know why I didn't think of it before.

The 17" screen has a 1920 pixel width and I tend to have Safari windows covering the whole thing. Gmail starts going mental sometimes when I am composing a message if the window is bigger than about 1500 pixels in width. Reduce the window size and everything goes back to normal.

 

[hcampbe1]

Glitch still present when adjust window size

It appears to happen regardless of what size I set my screen/page too.

Does anyone else have an idea as to why this is happening??? sorry my attachment doesn't appear correct, my screen looks exactly as previous posting.

Thanks!

 

[Detrius]

It appears to happen regardless of what size I set my screen/page too.

Does anyone else have an idea as to why this is happening??? sorry my attachment doesn't appear correct, my screen looks exactly as previous posting.

Thanks!

View attachment 274190

I concur with the suspicion that it's the graphics card. Create a new user and verify that the issue exists there. If you have a tester hard drive, boot from it and verify the issue exists there. The screen shot itself looks like what happens sometimes when graphics cards go bad.