More on Facebook typing torture
I've been having trouble with crazy cursor position errors and other glitches when trying to enter text on Facebook, like the one Brian described in a previous post, for quite some time, I don't even remember how long. But when I tried to go up to 38.2 Facebook was unbearable. I actually regressed to 31.x, which I don't think I've ever done with TFF before.
Today I tried out 38.3 and it was even worse. Everything was boggy, not just Facebook. So I restarted in safe mode. Big difference. Consequently, I jettisoned all add-ons except Pearl Crescent Page Saver, which I find indispensable.
General performance including Facebook has improved a great deal without the add-ons I dumped, but I still can't type comments on FB posts without crazy errors that are almost impossible to fix. I'm resorting to writing comments in the wonderful old ShoveBox app and pasting them.
Brian mentioned fixing his problem by using OnyX to clear the font cache. How else can I do that? OnyX doesn't seem to be available any more.
Keyboard shortcuts
Generic
| ? | Show this help |
|---|---|
| ESC | Blurs the current field |
Comment Form
| r | Focus the comment reply box |
|---|---|
| ^ + ↩ | Submit the comment |
You can use Command ⌘ instead of Control ^ on Mac
1 Posted by kathiallyson on 03 Oct, 2015 07:55 PM
OK, I just realized we're not talking about a font cache in TFF but the font cache in the OS. Found some information at Macworld on how to clear those caches per user in Terminal. But I'm a little wary of doing it. Should I, or might it cause other problems not worth bringing on? Any different ideas about this Facebook text entry issue?
Support Staff 2 Posted by Chris (chtrusch... on 03 Oct, 2015 08:43 PM
Can you describe the "crazy errors" happening when you enter text? I use FB every day and I haven't had much reason to complain other than text entry may be a bit slower than when typing in a word processor because FB is constantly looking for links and other things it can process during text entry.
For cleaning font caches and other maintenance I rely on Tinker Tool System. Version 1.94 is for Mac OS X 10.3-10.5 and is available here
http://www.bresink.com/osx/LegacyProducts.html
Cleaning font caches may or may not help, but can't do much harm.
3 Posted by kathiallyson on 03 Oct, 2015 09:15 PM
Mainly cursor position. The cursor moves of its own accord, jumping back a few characters while I'm typing and inserting the characters where they don't belong.
Making matters much worse, I also frequently have trouble deleting things. The simple back-delete doesn't work. I have to highlight what I want to delete first and even that workaround sometimes has to be repeated. Maybe that is just another symptom of cursor position error, I don't know. It all seems to be more severe with the comment fields (smaller font) than with composition of original status posts.
Sometimes, even when I have corrected something that got screwed up, and the word or phrase looks correct on the screen, TFF still thinks it has typos and puts the red spell-check dots under it. I ignore this at my peril. Usually when the text is posted it turns out it IS still screwed up, most often by character spaces that were not visible in preview.
I tried switching keyboards a while back, didn't help. Oh, in case anyone wondered, I did do the "refresh TFF" thing, as well.
This is on a Power Mac G5 running 10.5.8.
4 Posted by kathiallyson on 04 Oct, 2015 02:10 PM
I've been on FB for a bit today and written several comments without any interference at all. And it's Sunday, which normally is NOT a good day on FB. Go figure. Hoping 38.3 is going to work out better for me than I thought.
5 Posted by kathiallyson on 04 Oct, 2015 03:29 PM
P.S., I'm beginning to wonder if this is actually a static electricity problem, as I have been seeing other evidence of static being an issue on/around my desk. So that's the next thing I'm going to tackle.
Support Staff 6 Posted by Chris (chtrusch... on 04 Oct, 2015 04:15 PM
Good to hear your Facebook experience has improved. Did you clear the font cache? This would be a useful information for other users. BTW I doubt static electricity is to blame in this case. It can damage the RAM chips and other parts of your computer, but then you'll start seeing much more severe problems.
7 Posted by kathiallyson on 04 Oct, 2015 05:12 PM
You're right Chris, the static idea was a senior moment on my part :D . After all, if static were the culprit it would affect all my typing on the Web, not just on FB, and presumably in other apps, too.
The FB performance did start to degrade toward the end of my session, with the cursor jumping again. :(
No, I haven't cleared the font cache yet.
8 Posted by Steve Burbank on 11 Jun, 2022 11:25 PM
. . ps, I forgot to mention - I have Windows10 on my desktop computer, Chrome, and Grammarly running all the time.