I get the same behavior with both Chrome and Firefox on Windows, and this only happens with pure black, pure white, any color very close to one of them.
If you look at the color picker, you will notice that the rgb values โโdo not change when you move the cursor on the main square (they do if you use the vertical slider on the right, but thatโs not what the average user will tend to do).

The same thing happens with other applications that use the same color set, for example, MSpaint or Tkinter tkColorChooser.askcolor() . I assume that this is the default color choice for the default window, since the "color" has British English "color", which is my default language choice.
To fix this, simply use any color that is not #ffffff or #000000 (or closes) as the starting color.
<label for="doesntWork1">doesn't work</label> <input type="color" id="doesntWork1" value="#ffffff" onchange="alert(this.value);" /> <p> <label for="doesntWork2">doesn't work</label> <input type="color" id="doesntWork2" value="#000000" onchange="alert(this.value);" /> <p> <label for="works1">works</label> <input type="color" id="works1" value="#fdffff" onchange="alert(this.value);" /> <p> <label for="works2">works</label> <input type="color" id="works2" value="#000002" onchange="alert(this.value);" />
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