During the last couple of weeks (ca. since October 2023) we've been noticing a problem with essay questions in SEB quizzes.

While writing in essay text boxes, text bits are randomly inserted and replaced in the current text box, but also in the question text. The text fragments come and go as the user types or even drags the text window to resize it.

Notes:

• Only happens on Macs (Both Intel and M1), not on Windows
• Only observed on macOS 14.0 and 14.1.1
• started happening around two months ago (Oct 2023, around release of macOS 14)
• Only affects a sample of users, perhaps 5-10%
• I personally can't replicate it on an Intel MacBook Pro with macOS 14.1.1 and SEB 3.3
• Doesn't affect users every time, sometimes it works fine (without hardware / software changes)
• Page reload / previous+next page doesn't solve it
• hasn't been observed without SEB
• occurs on SEB 3.3
• Moodle version used: 4.1.2+ (Build: 20230318), no 3rd party theme etc.
• text editor used is Atto
• The text pieces are fragments of previously written text in the same quiz (in a preceding essay question)

I opened an issue in the SEB github which contains two videos illustrating the problem: https://github.com/SafeExamBrowser/seb-mac/issues/343

According to the SEB head developer it's highly likely that it's a WebKit/macOS issue.