Firefox on Mac textarea edit bug open since 2005

It's funny because I was just reading Gladwell's Outliers and his section on culture and airline crashes seems particularly relevant here. Here's a quote analysing the Korean Air flight 801 crash:

""" FIRST OFFICER: Don't you think it rains more? In this area, here?

The first officer must have thought long and hard before making that comment. [...] Among Korean Air flight crews, the expectation on layovers used to be that the junior officers would attend to the captain to the point of making him dinner or purchasing him gifts. As one former Korean Air pilot puts it [...] "the captain is in charge and does what he wants, when he likes, how he likes, and everyone else sits quietly and does nothing."

[...]

So when the first officer says, "Don't you think it rains more? In this area, here?" we know what he means by that:

Captain. You have committed us to visual approach, with no backup plan, and the weather outside is terrible. You think that we will break out of the clouds in time to see the runway. But what if we don't? It's pitch-black outside and pouring rain and the glide scope is down. """

The plane crashes not because of any individual error, but rather because the culture aboard the plane is weak in a tragically important area plane flight: communicating errors.

So imagine my surprise when I see this post on the bug tracker: "Ehsan, are you going to be able to pick this up again? If not, let's find a new owner."

In an open source project, you don't pay people in money. They're paid in intrinsic motivation. For that reason, it can be very dangerous to do things that would be commonplace in a business. For example, pulling someone off a task and reassigning it to someone else. I would read that post as "Ehsan, can you fix this or should I assign it to someone else?"

And I would read his reply as "No, I don't think I can without extra help". But no help comes, because the discussion is wrapped in social code to avoid appearing incapable or ordering someone around, neither of which are really acceptable in an open source project.

I suspect that this represents a general trend, and much of the reason why good design has come so late to the picture for Linux, when it seems to fall so naturally out of everything Apple touches. The culture in open source is a kind of loose-knit collective individualism, which means leadership in open source looks a lot like gardening: your main function is to tend the soil and stop the plants from strangling each other.

But design necessarily requires autocratic leadership - a person or persons whose vision for the product subsumes the priorities of any individual working on it. As a thought experiment, imagine if everyone's favourite ex-Apple CEO was faced with this bug. I can't help but imagine him kicking in someone's door and screaming "Why isn't it fixed? What do you need? Don't understand XBL? Here's the guy who writes the event handler. Neither of you are leaving until it's done. Namaste."

That's a good way to lose contributors, but it would get the bug fixed. I don't think Mozilla would necessarily be a better organisation with more screaming but, like Korean culture has a characteristic failure mode (problems that would have been impolite to fix), open source has its own characteristic failure mode: a problem that would have been solved if someone cared enough.

This is not, as the other comments on this post are suggesting, an issue with Firefox intentionally ignoring platform conventions. Safari has the exact same behavior on the Mac as Firefox — Cmd+Left goes back, and Cmd+Right goes forward, except in textareas, when Cmd+Left goes to the beginning of the line and Cmd+Right goes to the end of the line. This is an ugly technical issue with XBL that is preventing Mozilla from implementing the behavior that they need to on the Mac for contenteditable areas.

The right target of blame here is XBL. XBL deserves criticism for being heavyweight, overengineered, and still not being flexible enough despite its enormous complexity. But this is not an issue of Mozilla intentionally ignoring platform conventions. They are trying to adopt the OS-native conventions and are facing limitations in their platform.

I've had the same problem with the backspace. When hitting backspace while editing, often (not always) the browser goes to previous page (in history), so I lose my edits. Going forward does not give me back my edits.

So, the crux of the issue is that a cross platform program is trying to use a platform keystroke convention as some other function. This type of stuff really shows what happens when you violate someone's expectations of how apps work on their OS. Squeak is another example of a program that is it's own thing.

I wonder if Firefox ignores a custom ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict ?

You think that's epic?

Try the infamous plugin object reframe bug [1]. 10 years.

Granted, it's a very nasty bug inside code that has changed a lot over the years, and deep architectural understanding is necessary in order to solve it. But the fact that such a bug is still in the open says a lot.

[1] - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=90268

(edit: I haven't followed the bug in a while but apparently Josh Aas made some groundbreaking progress over the past few weeks. Looks pretty good.)

I hear these open source projects accept patches...

That's one of the reasons I can't stand using Firefox on OS X.

The funny thing is that even if the problem lies within XBL, it could be easily fixed for 99% of the cases through a small JavaScript code injection...

Think that's a long time? Check out how many bugs Eclipse has, that were first reported over 10 years ago: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/buglist.cgi?type0-1-0=equals;o...

You can mitigate the problem by installing Lazarus (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lazarus-form-...).

"Lazarus securely auto-saves all forms as you type, so after a crash, server timeout, or whatever, you can go back to the form, right click, "recover form", and breathe a sigh of relief."

Just one more example of why I think Firefox is a terrible browser on OS X. Platform conventions exist for a reason, and violating them should not be done without extremely good reason.

I'd call it a feature, not a bug