#Missing caret and placeholder in ChatGPT input field on Firefox 140+ (only in desktop layout)

5 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

visual hazel
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There’s a rendering bug affecting the ChatGPT input field in Zen 1.14.5b (Firefox 140.0.4) on Windows 11 (confirmed also on other platforms). After the page fully loads:

  • The blinking caret is missing
  • The placeholder text ("Ask something...") is also invisible
  • Typing still works, but the input field appears visually empty
  • The caret magically appears once you type enough to trigger a second line

This only affects desktop layout. If I open ChatGPT in responsive/mobile view, everything works correctly — caret and placeholder are visible as expected.

I've tested:

  • Hard refresh (Ctrl+Shift+R)
  • Disabling hardware acceleration
  • Clearing cache/cookies
  • Incognito mode
  • Other websites — issue is only with ChatGPT

The bug appeared suddenly a few hours ago. I inspected the DOM and noticed that the placeholder is implemented using a ::before pseudo-element inside a p.placeholder, nested in a div[contenteditable].
This is known to break caret rendering in Firefox when the editable field is technically "empty" (no real text nodes).

Chrome and Edge render everything correctly.
Responsive/mobile layout also works fine in Firefox.

image.png
astral wagon
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Can also reproduce; Seems to be some upstream issue that both the Zen and Mozilla team did not notice, as the same problem occurs on Vanilla Firefox too for me.

visual hazel
mental falcon
#

same

astral wagon
#

Seems fixed to me, I guess the team at OpenAI got a ton of reports regarding this lol