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ColoradoEric
Contributor
Contributor

Firefox in macOS VM doesn't show radio buttons

I have a macOS 10.14 (Mojave) virtual machine in which I regularly run Firefox (Quantum v67). Sometime in the last few weeks I've noticed that Firefox no longer displays radio buttons when running inside this virtual machine. For example, here is the "Radio Button Input" section from https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_forms.asp as it looks inside the VM:

pastedImage_0.png

Notice there are no actual buttons displayed next to the choices. This is how it is supposed to look:

pastedImage_1.png

I've tried playing with video/display settings in Fusion, performance/font settings in Firefox itself, various macOS system preferences, etc., but haven't found any fix.

Has anyone else seen this?

Thanks!

-Eric

version details:

macOS: 10.14.5 (both VM and host)

Fusion: 11.1.0

Firefox: 67.0.2

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5 Replies
ColoradoMarmot
Champion
Champion

If firefox is expecting 3d acceleration, it'll cause symptoms like this (that's not available in an OSX VM).

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ColoradoEric
Contributor
Contributor

I have the 3D acceleration disabled in the VM configuration, and have tried turning off Firefox's "Use hardware acceleration" setting, but that didn't resolve it.

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dempson
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

For reference: I see the same in my macOS Mojave VM, but not with the same version of Firefox (67.0.2) in my macOS 10.13.6 High Sierra VM. It does not happen when running Firefox on the host (also Mojave) so that points to something specific to running Mojave in a VM. I don't regularly run Firefox in a VM so no idea if this is a recent change of behaviour.

I tried a few older versions, and back as far as Firefox 64.0.2 it behaves the same way, which suggests it is not a recent change in Firefox. (Older versions of Firefox I tried crash in my Mojave VM.)

My software is a bit out of date as I haven't got around to installing some updates:

Host: macOS 10.14.4

Guest: macOS 10.14.3

VMware Fusion 11.0.3

As I'm running a several month old version of macOS in this VM it probably isn't a recent Mojave change either.

Possibly related: I also found that if I have my Mojave VM set to "Use full resolution for Retina display" then Firefox doubles the size of everything in its windows, making it unusable (the centre of the window is visible but the title bar is pushed outside the rectangle of the window, so is not accessible).

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Mikero
Community Manager
Community Manager

I think dlhotka's answer is correct (and I marked it so).

It's not a question of a setting to enable, it's that FF is potentially using 3D accelerated functions to draw elements of the UI.

In Mac speak, they're 'using Metal to draw parts of the UI'.

Wherever they do this, the UI will fail because Metal is not supported in macOS VMs.

I wasn't aware of FF using Metal to draw stuff previously, so perhaps it's something else, but if I were a betting man this would be my educated guess.

-
Michael Roy - Product Marketing Engineer: VCF
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ColoradoEric
Contributor
Contributor

If your guess is correct, that would mean Firefox is not obeying the "Use hardware acceleration when available" preference setting. That would surprise me.

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