When connecting an ESP8266 mini board which is requipped with an FTDI USB to serial chip, the IDE does not seems not very stable and results eventually in a blank screen .
The initial download goes well and it generally all works for a while.
The only way to get out of it is to kill the Arduino IDE process.
Operating System: WIndows 11
Version of FTDI Driver: 2.12.36.4 (same issue also detected with driver version 2.12.28)
Arduino IDE version: 2.3.3 (same issue also detected on version 2.3.2)
I have a strong suspicion that the blank screen (and freezing of the Arduino IDE) hence has to do with the way the USB/Serial communication is handled in case of the FTDI chipset.
This was tested on different computers by different students, different USB cables and mutiple ESP8266 boards
(When ESP8266 mini boards with the CH340 USB to serial chip are used, things are stable with version 3.5 or 3.7 of the ch340 driver)