OS X 10.8.2: Safari windows restored without drop shadow

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
October 24th, 2012 • 8:34 am

Last week, I wrote about a number of outstanding glitches in OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion). Here’s another one, which I forgot to mention at the time:

mountainlion-windows

The problem is fairly obvious: When Safari is launched and proceeds to restore its windows (for example, after an application crash, which is what happened in this particular case; but the problem also occurs after a simple quit-and-relaunch), it somehow “forgets” to add the drop shadow around the edges of all the background windows. (The frontmost window does get the deeper drop shadow, as expected.)

Since the drop shadow is effectively the only visible edge of a window in OS X 10.8, this glitch has pretty obvious and rather ugly results.

Hiding Safari and bringing it back to the foreground fails to force OS X to restore the missing drop shadows. The only fix that I have found is to cycle through all windows. When one of these windows without the drop shadow is brought to the foreground, it acquires the foreground drop shadow. And then when it’s relegated to the background again, it correctly switches to the (shallower) background drop shadow.

It’s just a visual glitch, but it’s a pretty obvious one.

Now, I should note that I see this problem primarily with Safari windows on my secondary screen. I have a dual-monitor setup (right now a source of other on-going problems) and I tend to keep my Safari windows on my secondary monitor (i.e. the one without the menu bar). I don’t know if it has anything to do with anything.


2 Responses to “OS X 10.8.2: Safari windows restored without drop shadow”

  1. Betalogue » OS X 10.8.2: Hot corners not so hot with dual monitor setup says:

    […] other glitches that I have noticed with the latest version of Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8.2), there is the […]

  2. Betalogue » Mountain Lion’s Safari: Does not resume properly after restart says:

    […] that the Safari application in OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) suffers from a bug that causes it to fail to draw drop shadows around Safari windows restored on a secondary monitor. It’s annoying, but it’s a minor […]