Mouse Hover Border Bug on Overview Page (with steps to reproduce)

For a long time, a bug has existed with the mouse-hover border drawn around games on the overview page. Specifically, the border remains drawn, even if the mouse is not anywhere near the board. There may be many ways to reproduce this bug but here is one that definitely works every time:

  1. Navigate to the overview page and place the mouse over a board thumbnail, the mouser-hover border appears as expected.
  2. Press Alt+Tab and switch to any window that obscures the mouse location.
  3. Move your mouse to anywhere.
  4. With Alt+Tab, the task bar or any other method, bring the browser window in which OGS was open to the foreground.
  5. Observe that the mouse-hover border will still be drawn, even though your mouse is now well away from the board thumbnail. It will remain drawn until you next move the mouse over some part of the browser window.

For those of us who spend a lot of time working with a keyboard only (as programmers or writers) and often use Alt+tab to check for new moves, this is a very annoying bug. Furthermore, if the erroneous mouse-hover border is drawn on the left-most game on the page, it looks almost the same as the border that shows that it is your move, next. This means that you cannot check for demanded moves with the keyboard alone - you must switch to the browser window and move your mouse about over it to ensure that you are not seeing an artefact of this bug.

That’s a Chrome issue that affects all :hover css rules (you can verify that on pretty much any site by hovering over a link, tabbing out, moving your mouse, then tabbing back in), so there’s nothing we can practically do about that, but the good news is they’ll probably fix it someday.

2 Likes

You’re absolutely right - I even found the issue number: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=386896

Couldn’t you work around the bug by disabling the :hover style in the Window’s blur event? Chrome is a popular browser. You’d only need to do it for the board thumbnails because they’re the only things that are actually broken by this.

Alternatively, can you change the hover border colour so that it is less like the you-to-play colour? That would fix the issue, too.