I've noticed lately that when I'm using WhatsApp, particularly when navigating a conversation, like I have someone's conversation window open and I'm navigating messages, it'll randomly open up the reactions menu for me to react to some random message. Does anyone know why this is and how to get it to stop doing that?
It used to be a very seemless experience on the mac, and nowadays, not so much.
Comments
Yes this is a bug
Yeah I am going through this. There are two workarounds: first to use the arrow keys with the VO keys (left option+CTRL). The other one is to navigate with the touchpad swipes.
HTH
Disable mouse following VO cursor
This problem has been manifesting for a while, and the workaround that I found almost immediately was to just stop VoiceOver from moving the mouse in tandem with its own cursor, which can be done on the Navigation pane of VoiceOver Utility. As I understand it, this problem results from Meta changing the behavior of the reactions to trigger when the mouse hovers over the conversation, so preventing VoiceOver from moving the mouse avoids unintentionally trigger those events. Beware that some websites may stop working properly after this change though, since they do expect the mouse to be over any element that is receiving a click event.
I don't use the MacOS version anymore
I stopped using the MacOS version. I use WhatsApp Web ad added it to the dock. It works much better than the desktop app for me.