463685 - Can't highlight or click on select, checkbox and radio buttons when designMode="on". events don't fire

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 446670

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Marc Cohen]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.17) Gecko/20080829 Firefox/2.0.0.17
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0

I am responsible for maintaining an app that allows a user to create/edit HTML of a webpage using designMode in mozilla/firefox. This HTML editor relies on the user being able to context-click on an element to display a custom context menu where they have actions they can take on the clicked element, such as "element properties".  The problem is that a few HTML entities cannot be clicked, right clicked, or any form of clicked on in FF3.

The problem elements are SELECT, INPUT[type=checkbox], and INPUT[type=radio].  These element seem to completely eat any click event.  In FF2, clicking the item would at least give it focus, and I can display options for the element once it becomes highlighted.  In firefox 3, I can't even get the element to have focus, thus the user cannot edit any properties of it.  The browser eats any click and focus events, and doesn't bubble anything up the event chain either.

To reproduce, create an HTML page with one of these elements.  Set designmode to "on" for the body tag, or a div containing one of the problem elements.

Once design mode is on, you cannot even give focus to these elements.  Context-clicks do not work, nothing at all.

In the EditorOverride.css file in the Firefox "res" folder, there are comments around the area that indicate you all know this is a problem, and that there is a better way of handling this, but since the inception of Firefox it has not been addressed.  This is a MAJOR problem for my application which is used by many large companies, including fortune 500 companies.

The only solution seems to be to have them use Internet Explorer, as Firefox seems incapable of handling the selection of these elements for editing.  This leaves our Linux and Mac users in the dark, as they do not have a version of IE to use.

Please, please fix this issue.  All I ask is that you don't block the context menu event from firing when in design mode.  That will 100% fix my problem.

A workaround through javascript would also be appreciated, as I need a way to know when the user has clicked on one of these elements.

Thank you.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Create a page with a select box, checkbox, or radio button
2.set designmode="on" on an element containing one of the problem form fields
3.try to click, right click, any click on the form element

Actual Results:  
element cannot be clicked on, highlighted, etc.  The click, context-click, and focus events are completely blocked.

Expected Results:  
I should be able to click on the element to give it focus, or right click on it and have the oncontextmenu event fire.

Any fix or workaround is very needed and would be appreciated.  We have thousands of users impacted by this.

Comment 1

[Robert Stopp (textrinum)]

See bug 446670 and vote!