1356542 - Source view irrevocably deletes page when ibus Chinese input method is active

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(SeaMonkey :: Composer, defect)

Description

[Silas S. Brown]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_5) AppleWebKit/537.78.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.1.6 Safari/537.78.2

Steps to reproduce:

Installed SeaMonkey 2.46 from seamonkey-project.org on WattOS LXDE R9 (Ubuntu 14.04 LTS) with apt-get install ibus-pinyin (enable this pinyin input in the LXDE desktop preferences, and restart X11).

In Seamonkey Composer, select Source view and use the mouse to select (click and drag) some of the source.


Actual results:

All page source immediately disappears from the start of the selection to the end of the document.  Undo option does not bring it back.  Switching back to normal view also shows the text has disappeared.  Chinese user I was trying to help had not saved so was predictably upset.


Expected results:

Source code should have been selected ready for copying.

Bug is consistently reproduced when ibus-pinyin active; unable to reproduce when ibus-pinyin not active.  Unable to reproduce the bug in Libreoffice or other non-Mozilla apps, so it seems to be a problem specific to the interaction between ibus-pinyin and Mozilla (although whose 'fault' it is I have no idea).

User said a similar problem happened in Firefox 52.0.2 when they tried to select the current URL from the address bar with ibus-pinyin enabled: the URL disappeared when Select was attempted.  So it's possibly ibus's interaction with a shared Mozilla component.  Not sure where to report the bug, so for now I'm reporting against Composer since that's the component with the most serious consequence (deleting an entire document you just created); please pass on the info if it's best reported somewhere else.

As a suggested temporary workaround, is there some way to disable interaction with ibus when in modes for which input of foreign characters is less likely to be appropriate?  as we can't really expect all users to remember to manually deactivate Chinese input before entering source mode or the URL box.

Comment 1

[Silas S. Brown]

In this user's case I worked around the problem by switching her box to the rime input method (apt-get install fcitx-rime librime-data-pinyin-simp) instead of ibus.

Comment 2

[Silas S. Brown]

Unable to reproduce in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, when selecting URL from address bar in Firefox (72.0.1) with ibus (1.5.17) running and set to Chinese pinyin mode. So I suspect whatever the underlying issue is was fixed sometime between 2014 and 2018.