cursor over image makes image blank out...why?

[holt]

This never used to happen up until a few years ago. But more and more nowadays, whenever I hover my mouse cursor over a picture, the picture goes blank and is replaced by the size -such as for example '1300 x 957'- and reappears when I move the cursor away again. If it is an anti-copying or anti-copyright infringement feature, it sucks because I can still copy and paste it just as easy. All it accomplishes to me is to boost the annoyance factor. So anyways, why do they do that?

[tomos]

with which software? and OS info might be helpful

[Shades]

To me it sounds like you are using a browser, with particular add-on installed, that makes this happen. Add-on specifically intended for web-design might be configured in such a way that you see information about the image instead of the image when hovering over an image. Helpful for a web-designer, not so much for a user interested in only the content.

Unless you give us much more specific details about what you were doing and with what, every comment/suggestion/possible cause you read in this thread will be like trying to hit a flying bat in a pitch dark room...

[hpearce]

Firefox has an addon that let's you resize a displayed image by dragging the cursor across the image to decrease  or increase the resolution.

Doing it correctly the first time plays a big role in whether the image goes blank. Then you have to refresh.

[holt]

Thank you for the sugs. Lemme see...(mumble mumble). Here's some of the info...
OS is WinXP on a Celeron 4; a little slow but not as bad as all that...I can play back vids from YT smoothly but only if I download them first and play them back on VLC. I realize how pathetic that sounds, but it is better than nothing and almost never freezes up or crashes.
The vanishing pix problem shows in both Pale Moon & SeaMonkey in Duckduckgo; I never use Google and it always rejects me anyways.
Problem also appears on various or random web pages.
I have very few add-ons to the above two browsers; the machine is a freebie hand-me-down, so that could mean something installed by previous owner (a relative).
So IOW, you're saying you don't experience this problem yourselves, and/or it is unique to my machine. Well that's something worth knowing anyways; I thought everyone was getting it.

[tomos]

Ctrl+Shift+A will show your addons in PaleMoon.

FWIW, videos not playing smoothly could also be related to your internet connection.

[IainB]

@holt: If the symptoms only occur when in a browser, then the cause would presumably/probably be in either a feature of the browser (but I have never seen such a feature as that as a default feature of a browser) or (and more likely) a feature of an extension/add-on.
Given that PaleMoon is a Mozilla-derived browser and SeaMonkey grew from the Mozilla Application Suite, I would suspect that a common extension/add-on (one that you are using in both browsers) is producing the symptoms - by design rather than by accident (i.e., it is probably not a bug).

What you should probably do is look through the extensions/add-ons and their settings in one of the browsers, to see if you can spot the likely culprit.
If that doesn't throw up any suspects, then try a process of elimination:

• Disable (do not delete) half of the extensions/add-ons in that browser.
• If the symptoms persist after you have restarted the browser, then re-enable the previously-disabled extensions/add-ons, and disable the other half.
• On restarting, the symptoms should have gone away.
• When the symptoms have gone away, you then re-enable the disabled extensions/add-ons, a few at a time, restarting the browser each time and checking to see if the symptoms have returned.
• When the symptoms do return (as they must, eventually), then the last few you re-enabled, as a set, must contain the problem, so you then disable all but the first in that set, restart the browser and keep that up- re-enabling them one at a time - until you identify the single problem extension/add-on that produces the symptoms.

Tedious, but pragmatic and it should eventually identify the causal problem extension/add-on.

Hope that all makes sense and is of use.