Tracking bug to keep track of where old bugs should be duped, and help figure out why we're still getting reports of these problems in Firefox 1.5.

Changing the platform/OS, as I see this on WinXP also.

From http://www.squarefree.com/2005/12/21/need-help-reproducing-a-focus-issue/: * Martijn points out that bug 312251 is one way to reproduce this. That's probably not what's happening to the reporters of bug 320083 and bug 320414, though. * Jan! reports that this happens after viewing an embedded Windows Media file with the Windows Media Player plugin, and that going to full screen and back (pressing F11 twice) fixes it. * Zach said he had this problem (on pages that had onunload events?) until he uninstalled Tab Mix Plus. * Manuzhai says this happens on a vBB forum. (Combined with bug 320414, this makes me think that the designMode issues are related to bug 306267, a bug where the caret is initially invisible in designMode iframes.) * When this happens, there are often problems with context menus and not being able to cut/copy/paste.

I was able to directly reproduce this here on Bugzilla (or any other textarea), by typing in the text area, hitting CTRL+F, pressing ESC, and continuing typing. However, more attempts to replicate it have failed, as it took focus from the text area...

I have found a temporary workaround for this bug. If you go to about:config and look for the "accessibility.typeaheadfind.flashBar" Preference Name and change its value from 0 or 1 (if it is 0, change it to 1; if it is 1, change it to 0) then the feature seems to "reset" and you will be able to enter in the arbitrary characters in textboxes again.

*** Bug 335539 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 337820 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 338229 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Bug 339465 has steps to reproduce that work 100% of the time for some people, involving opening a second Firefox window by double-clicking the Firefox desktop icon a second time.

bryner suggests that one possible change here is to change the find bar's keypress listener to be in the system event group and then open a find bar when another handler has not called preventDefault(), instead of trying to check if the focused element is editable. I'd write this comment on an appropriate dependent bug, but I'm lost to know which one it is.

What kinds of bugs (possibly not involving the Find bar) would remain if we did that? Could we add assertions to help make the causes of those bugs more apparent?

Are bug 292395 (see comment 6 in particular) and bug 339158 duplicates?

Actually, we're not going to block on a tracking bug. Please request approval for individual bug fixes and/or nominate individual bugs to block the FF2 release.

I have found similar behavior (including the workaround) for arrow keys as well in v1.5.0.4.

*** Bug 343448 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

This affects the arrow keys, as well as the copy / paste functionality but only in some cases. For another non-gmail related example, open http://www.tenthdimension.com/flash2.php in a browser, then open another instance of firefox and the arrow keys / ctrl-v in the url bar of the new browser will not work.

This bug seems to pop up randomly when the option, "begin finding when you begin typing'is selected. Closing Firefox and restarting sometimes corrects the problem. However, it may take several tries.

This bug has been going on for sometime. I've had it for at least two months on several releases. My family uses text fields alot and it fails everyday. I am giving in as I can't keep them using this bug forever. Hopefully when its fixed I can get them to come back.

I get this bug when I open three instances (new browser windows, not new tabs) of Firefox (1.5--latest version as of August 30, 2006). My home page is Google.com. On the first two instances, I can press the apostrophe freely (I turned accessibility.typeaheadfind.autostart value to false); however, on the third instance of Firefox, typing apostrophe in the search field brings up the Find Bar. There are some caveats to this bug: I can recreate this bug simply by opening up one single instance of Firefox (homepage http://www.google.com/), clicking on the top right corner (where the Mozilla.org website button is) and then pressing apostrophe when the Mozilla.org site loads, once again bringing the find bar at the bottom. My settings are default mainly except for the fact that I turned it so clicking links from other programs (AIM) opens in a new broswer window, I turned off password saving, and left the DOM Inspector default Firefox extension in my browser. Please let me know if someone can replicate using this info.

Bug#320465 This is in regards to comment #4. What is about:config and where/how do i access it? i've tried the run DOS prompt and other things, but it would be nice if you could please be a little more specific as to where/how i initiate this about:config fix. Thank you. Please email the answer to access@tsites.com.

(In reply to comment #18) > I get this bug when I open three instances (new browser windows, not new tabs) > of Firefox (1.5--latest version as of August 30, 2006). My home page is > Google.com. On the first two instances, I can press the apostrophe freely (I > turned accessibility.typeaheadfind.autostart value to false); however, on the > third instance of Firefox, typing apostrophe in the search field brings up the > Find Bar. > > There are some caveats to this bug: I can recreate this bug simply by opening > up one single instance of Firefox (homepage http://www.google.com/), clicking > on the top right corner (where the Mozilla.org website button is) and then > pressing apostrophe when the Mozilla.org site loads, once again bringing the > find bar at the bottom. > > My settings are default mainly except for the fact that I turned it so clicking > links from other programs (AIM) opens in a new broswer window, I turned off > password saving, and left the DOM Inspector default Firefox extension in my > browser. > > Please let me know if someone can replicate using this info. > By going to Start->Internet (on Windows XP, where Firefox is the default browser) three time, I was able to reproduce the problem in the third browser window (but not in the first two). Using File->New Window inside Firefox, I was not able to. Also, I could not get the problem by clicking on the Mozilla home page button in the top right corner of Firefox.

I have personally been having this issue at www.dslreports.com, very sporadically, and the context menu and clipboard problems at the same time. This morning I was able to get out of this issue, without restarting the browser, when I had hit Ctrl + S and cancelled the dialogue box the appeared. If I were to guess I would say that the dialogue box stole the focus and when closed the focus was reset to normal. -- Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1b2) Gecko/20060821 Firefox/2.0b2 ID:2006082101

The following stopped the problem for me: Go to Options > Advanced > General Under accessibility Make sure “begin finding when you begin typing” is NOT CHECKED.

I had never experienced this issue myself I set about trying to reproduce the issue, following the test case reported by the OP in Bug 339465. I was unsuccessful. Someone posted in a Mozillazine thread http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=460799 that for them, the problem first seemed to appear after installing some extensions. Using a fresh 1.5.0.6 install and new Profile - and following the aforementioned test-case, after installing the last of their 7 named extensions, I was *shocked* to finally see it with my own eyes! I posted in detail on Mozillazine, but to make a long story short - over the course of 1hr of repetitive testing, I successfully reproduced the unexpected appearance of the Find Bar 7 or 8x using that 2-window Google-as-a-bookmark test-case. My tests using GMail compose window and the / and ' (and all other keys) resulted in no unusual behaviour whatsoever. But each time the Google page error happened, I checked the JS Error Console, and it showed the following error: --------------- Error: [Exception... "'Permission denied to set property XULElement.selectedIndex' when calling method: [nsIAutoCompletePopup::selectedIndex]" nsresult: "0x8057001e (NS_ERROR_XPC_JS_THREW_STRING)" location: "JS frame :: http://www.google.ca/ :: sf :: line 8" data: no] Source File: http://www.google.ca/ Line: 8 ---------------- I had never seen this error before, and I could not get it to appear under any other circumstance. A quick bit of Googling on the error turned up: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=313755& and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=236791 ... no surprise - FOCUS issues. Bug 236791 is marked 'Fixed' .. a patch was approved back in June for branch Gecko 1.8.1+..... It just so happened that during my testing, an Update notice popped up telling me FF1.5.0.7 was now available. I ended up installing it and after 15-20mins of repeated testing on 1.5.0.7, was entirely unsuccessful at reproducing the issue again. I uninstalled and reinstalled 1.5.0.6, trying to determine whether (any, or) a single extension was at fault - though I did reproduce the error again, unfortunately I found nothing conclusive. I asked affected users in the Mozillazine thread to try 1.5.0.7 for a day or 2 and report back if it still is an issue.

I have experienced the bug, but have been unable to reproduce it consistently in 1.5.0.7 Occurred while typing in the body text while composing a new message in yahoo email. Extensions: Tabbrowser Preferences 1.2.8.9, Adblock v.5 d3 nightly 42, Nuke Anything Enhanced 0.53, Linky 2.7.1, Noscript 1/1/4, Colorzilla 0.8.3.1, Autohide 1.0.1 on Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7 (In reply to comment #23) > It just so happened that during my testing, an Update notice popped up telling > me FF1.5.0.7 was now available. I ended up installing it and after 15-20mins of > repeated testing on 1.5.0.7, was entirely unsuccessful at reproducing the issue > again.

Have not had a problem with this bug in weeks and all of a sudden it has failed 4 times in the last 2 days. I am running 1.5.0.7 Begin finding when you begin typing is turned off. Don't know what changed. I don't know of any options changing.

To reproduce: Set www.google.com as your homepage. Turn on "Begin finding when you being typing". Now close all instances of Firefox. Open a new instance and start typing (anything) straight away, before Google has finished rendering. If the bug doesn't appear, close Firefox and try again. It might take several attempts, but you should definitely hit the problem soon enough (we've tried it on a few different PCs here and it's always shown up after a few attempts).

If you can't fix this, then at least disable the auto-find menubar by default. This is one of those "To firefox or not to firefox..." bugs. Seriously! Anyway, I reproduce this one frequently with extensions Talkback 1.5.0.7, Google Toolbar for Firefox 2.1.20060807W. I do not see it as much on a computer with the first and third extension above and several others.

It happens sometimes also in this case - I have an italian version (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; it; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7) - The "checkbox" in the options is off (see after) - my system is a Windows 98 SE Italian completely patched. - I go on a phpbb-based forum (last patched version) and try to answer in a textarea field Sometimes the fastfind box is triggered while writing something in the field as soon as you type an apostrophe ('). The way I found to get rid of is: - going to the options menu - call the "advanced"->"general" submenu - turn On then Off again the checkbox on "activate fastfind...". After doing this it is possibile to type the apostrophe again without interferences. At least for a while (days or weeks). I didn't found out what triggers the change. The weird thing is that everything seems to be the same before and after the ON-OFF trick... The checkbox was off before and after the "option tour" but it works... Hope this helps PS: feel free to move this comment if this was not the appropriate place. Thank you for your work!

Suggesting more dependencies: 316280, 344753

I think this issue is going to be fixed by 220900.

I'm still seeing Bug 365231 using 2.0.0.1, so I don't think Bug 220900 fixed everything.

V1.5.0.10 I have found that when the apostrophe brings up the find box while I am typing in a textbox (which I do a lot on forums) the cut and paste facility is also disabled. I hope this might help finding the cause.

This bug is still present in Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3 with a newly created profile as well as the 2.0.0.3 Windows build. It's 100% consistently reproducible and a total show-stopper for non-technical people. I've lost 12 people personally back to IE because of this bug. Steps to reproduce: 1. Set your homepage to anything with a text box 2. Enable FYAT 3. Create a new window instance with Cmd-N 4. Click in text box 5. Begin typing, FYAT box will appear and hijack keystrokes Steps to work around: 7. Invoke the Downloads window with Cmd-J 8. Close the Downloads window with Cmd-W 9. Click in text box 10. Type, keystrokes will appear in text box as expected It seems to me like firefox isn't properly tracking which window has the focus and opening and closing the downloads window resets its brain.

Ty - thanks for the update, we were just talking about this issue today actually. Two questions - when you're opening the new windows, are you doing it very quickly, or are you giving everything time to load? Secondly, the people you've lost, do they have something in common, as in they're your coworkers on the same network or something similar that might be useful in testing? Oh third question and very important, when this happens to you is it, or did it used to also be paired with copy/paste functions not working either?

Incredibly infuriatingly, this bug caught me on this page when I opened it from the link in the email! GRRRR! 1) I've tried it both ways, it happens regardless of wither the page has loaded completely. 2) The pool of people who's computers I administrate is my family/their church. The generation of my family directly above me is pretty much responsible for running the local church. I have a network of 5 computers and 8 users in this house, 3 computers on-site at the church, and about a dozen computers and 40 users spread out across the 2 counties in a VPN. The network and VPN are used about 75% for personal use and 25% of church business (such as accounting, teleconferencing, etc. so Trustee meetings can be held without everyone having to use a full tank of gas to get to the meeting). There are about 50% Mac boxes (almost all on 10.4.9), 30% Windows (98 through XP, no Vista yet), and the rest are Ubuntu (Dapper Drake). I have no idea if this helps you or not for testing. Like I said, though, rather than ask me what's going on and get told the fix, a lot of people are just bailing back to IE or Safari depending on their platform. 3) I have the copy/paste issue as well, let me do a little testing before I confirm that they occur together 100% of the time. My gut feeling is that they do, but I want to be sure before I tell you it for a fact. The fix for both the copy/paste issue and the FAYT issue is the same, btw, open/close the downloads window.

Incredibly infuriatingly, this bug caught me on this page when I opened it from the link in the email! GRRRR! 1) I've tried it both ways, it happens regardless of wither the page has loaded completely. 2) BTW, I've only confirmed that the non-Mac platforms are having this problem. I haven't confirmed that opening a new window will be 100% reproducible on anything other than a Mac. The pool of people who's computers I administrate is my family/their church. The generation of my family directly above me is pretty much responsible for running the local church. I have a network of 5 computers and 8 users in this house, 3 computers on-site at the church, and about a dozen computers and 40 users spread out across the 2 counties in a VPN. The network and VPN are used about 75% for personal use and 25% of church business (such as accounting, teleconferencing, etc. so Trustee meetings can be held without everyone having to use a full tank of gas to get to the meeting). There are about 50% Mac boxes (almost all on 10.4.9), 30% Windows (98 through XP, no Vista yet), and the rest are Ubuntu (Dapper Drake). I have no idea if this helps you or not for testing. Like I said, though, rather than ask me what's going on and get told the fix, a lot of people are just bailing back to IE or Safari depending on their platform. 3) I have the copy/paste issue as well, let me do a little testing before I confirm that they occur together 100% of the time. My gut feeling is that they do, but I want to be sure before I tell you it for a fact. The fix for both the copy/paste issue and the FAYT issue is the same, btw, open/close the downloads window.

Sorry for the previous double post, the second one actually has a sentence in it that the first on doesn't. I thought I had hit escape in time to stop the submission the first time. Anyway, the copy/paste issue and the FAYT issue are DEFINITELY NOT triggered together. I just tested this and they happen independently. The first new window I opened had both the copy/paste and the FAYT issue, both of which were cleared by open/close of downloads window. The subsequent new windows had ONLY the FAYT issue. I have not yet found a consistent trigger for the copy/paste issue, but that one drives me crazy too.

I have this problem in 2.0.0.3 (and the latest 1.5. which I dumped to see if Copy/Paste worked any better in 2.0), but I can't always reproduce it. It allowed me to use apostrophes here in the Additional Comments box when I opened Help Contents and searched for "Quick find", which is what opens when I type an apostrophe.

Peter - what os are you using? Do you have "search for text when I type" checked in Advanced -> general in the options/prefs panel?

Sorry I left out those details. WinXPSP2 and no "search for text when I type." Once again, the bug went away when I performed the search in Help for Quick and, again, I can use apostrophe here without the Quick Find dialog. It is just the Help pop-up, not the Search dialog box, that clears it. Open help and ' returns. 1) I just switched to another tab (a Hotmail message page), opened a Bugzilla report and I could type an ' in the dialog box. I then went to the other tab, used the Back arrow to go back 2 pages, and I could still type a ' on this tab. I deleted the message notifying me of Comment 39 on that other tab, came back to this tab, and typing ' in this box popped up Quick Find. Again, I used Help Search to allow ' again. 2)Back in the Hotmail tab, I again backed up to an Excite.com page, but I could still type a ' here. I clicked a link on the Excite page, clicked another link on that page, backed up 2 pages to Excite, and the ' here popped up Quick Find. 3)However, I just repeated that same process again and the ' still works here. Maybe I'm deep enough in to push this bug aside? 4) I opened a new tab, went to my Excite homepage, clicked a link, clicked another link, backed up to Excite, and the ' failed! Going forward on the links didn't do it, just backing up. Could the cached pages have something to do with it? 5)I just tried it 3 more times and ' works every time. BTW, the Help pop-up got my arrow/cursor keys to work again in this dialog box. I guess the Help pop-up really Helps to kill this bug.

Further testing revealed that the "anything you type in a text box brings up Quick Find" was in fact due to the refspoof extension. However, now that I have uninstalled the offending extension and unchecked the "begin searching as I begin typing" preference, I see the ' and / activating the Quick Find bar at the bottom. The cure is still the same, however, open the Downloads window with Cmd-J, then close it with Cmd-W, then click in the text box and type normally. This does seem to be happening at the same time the Copy/Paste functions fail to work. It also seems to happen with about the same frequency on all platforms. I do not have a reliable trigger for it at this point. Thank gods I have a reliable work around though!

Pete, Ty - thanks for the info This is a focus issue, so opening any sort of dialog *should* reset the focus, not just the help dialog. ' and / are both shortcuts to launch the toolbar, so that's why these keys are an issue even if search when you type is off. Ty - are you finding that this happens when navigating in the history like Pete is? Pete - can you go to about:config in the url bar, filter for browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers if it's set to -1 change it to 0, if it's set to anything else, change it to -1 (default). Since you're seeming to hit it while browsing the history, this is just a guess, see if the fast back/forward cache is any way related.

No, I rarely ever use the History and I get this bug all the time. It seems to be related to a window or tab being "new" or having switched out to another application with Cmd-Tab and then later coming back to Ff with Cmd-Tab. New tabs and windows have it about equally often but I can't magically make it happen. As soon as I "fix" a window or tab, it stays fixed.

I agree that it is a focus problem. The ' and / are supposed to be a feature outside of the dialog box, not in one. I was just relating what I was doing to cause this focus problem. It may even be something on the pages I'm frequenting. It just seemed like it showed up more when I use the cached history rather than the original page opening up. I don't refresh the page, just what history has. My browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers was set at default -1. I switched to 0, closed and reopened Firefox. It took 2 tries and leaving the first new tab open to get the ' to open Quick Find from this dialog box. I'm not sure what the setting does, but I'll set it back to the default. I don't notice it when going to new links in the new tab, just backing up. There may be other ways to get it to happen. I just noticed this way. I didn't note this before, but I leave the focus inside this dialog box when I open the other tabs. The blinking cursor is still in this box when I return. Once the problem begins, clicking outside the box, opening Quick Find and clicking back into the box still opens Quick Find. Thanks Ty for the cmd-j shorter-cut to the workaround.

I don't think I've mentioned this before, but if you create a new tab and then new tab is afflicted with this bug, then your keystrokes "fall through" to the old tab. This is something I've noticed for a long time, but it happened tonight so it reminded me. I Cmd-left-clicked a link to open it in a new tab. Then I clicked on the new tab in the tab bar. Then I hit spacebar to page down in the new tab. After hitting it a few times, I realized it wasn't working and "fixed" the tab with the download window. Once I had finished reading the child tab, I closed it with Cmd-W. Looking at the parent tab, I realized it had paged-down by the number of times I had hit the spacebar in the child tab. Like I said, I've seen this all along, but never thought to mention it. Hope it's helpful.

Ty - there's actually a bug on that (typing going to the parent tab), not sure which one. If you can't find it, email me and I'll do a search. Peter - not sure what else to suggest you check. Keep us posted if you find out more details.

Ah, I was seeing it as caused by the same loss of focus that was causing the Find problem. I'll look for the other bug on here.

It probably is, but dealing with these issues based on groups of symptoms helps us make sure we don't assume something's fixed when it's not.

I tried IE7, but I haven't committed enough time to it. Firefox v3 Gran Paridiso doesn't have this problem, as of early release 0a5. 0a6 locks up and has to be killed, so I'll stay with 0a5 for a while. The plugins don't work because they don't recognize it as Firefox. I'll watch the alpha/beta releases and let them know when this issue shows up again (and copy/paste, cursor control, and "open in new tab" issues.) Bye.

Don't see a reason to block on a tracking bug this broad. Nom individuals as needed.

FYI: Bug 311376 now has a testcase that reproduces perfectly in 2.0.0.8 (but not 3.*), at least it reproduced on 2 completely different Windows configurations. Testing on other platforms and/or debug builds is highly welcome!

This bug is still active with the last version of firefox. (3.5.7) :-( It's particularly annoying when it happens (very frequently) with Gmail. I guess it's because Gmail is permanently loading and so Firefox doesn't realize we're actually typing in a text area. (just a thought though, because I'm not a debugger..)

fabien - What operating system, and version, are you using?

Thanks for your answer. My operating system is a Windows Vista SP2 up to date. My version of Firefox is 3.5.7 as said above. This problem is really annoying since each time I'm writing a mail I need to open the download box and then come back to the text area (that's the only turnaround I've found out until now.. but it's not really a satisfying fix..) If I can help more, tell me.

Fabien - if you could start a support thread at http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/forum/1?openpost=1 and then post the link to your thread here we can troubleshoot your problem then report back here if we find out anything interesting.

Everything here is resolved. I'm going to close out this bug because I'm pretty sure nobody is using it.