+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #368758 +++ The pref editor.quotesPreformatted was introduced as a "temporary" hack for bug 69638. It's used in two places: * nsHTMLEditor::InsertAsPlaintextQuotation() if somehow set True, puts reply-quotes inside a <pre> rather than a <span> in the plain-text editor. No visible effect in the compose window, but requires an extra rule in HTML.CSS to colorize the pre[_moz_quote]. * nsPlainTextSerializer::Write() if True, may cause a bypass of the "no intelligent wrapping" section of the DOM-to-Text conversion of the plain-text editor's buffer into a message, thereby preventing quotes from being wrapped -- the same behavior seen when the pref is turned off and the quote is contained within a <span>. The pref is set to False by default; I seriously doubt anyone still uses this for anything. I gather it was desirable when there was some other, harder-to-deal-with problem in the editor's behavior within a <pre>, but that's obsolete now. This pref and the code supporting it is all cruft, and should be removed. xref bug 233705 -- the pref discussed at that bug also "bypasses the 'no intelligent wrapping'" DOM-to-text conversion.

This already appears to have landed on comm-central, but I don't see the responsible changeset offhand.

(That or another patch in my massive queue made the same change)

Yes, it landed on central in bug 610038. This patch is for aurora, see the patch flags.

Thanks for the separate bug.