1486513 - Extra line breaks when posting to forums with editor.use_div_for_default_newlines=true

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Web Compatibility :: Site Reports, defect, P2)

Description

[Jonas Larsson]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:61.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/61.0
Build ID: 20180807170231

Steps to reproduce:

In recent versions of Firefox posting messages in forums based on vBulletin 3.8 creates extra line-breaks in the posts. I have investigated this and it seems to be related to the changes done recently in Firefox related to the line-breaks and the option editor.use_div_for_default_newlines. I have read about this change on several places in Bugzilla, and it seems to have been done to make Firefox more similar to Chrome. However, when using Chrome I do not get any extra line-breaks when posting messages. And if if toggle editor.use_div_for_default_newlines to False in Firefox it works as it should. I have seen several other large forums where this problem has been noticed. vBulletin 3.8 is still used on many of the largest forums so this is a problem which affects many thousand users. Someone else is discussing the problem here: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=3040337


Actual results:

When posting messages to a vBulletin 3.8 based forum, like https://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/site-help-feedback-discussions/ pressing enter twice to create a paragraph-break creates three line-breaks instead of two.


Expected results:

Extra line-breaks should not be added in forum posts.

Comment 1

[Daniel Bodea [:danibodea]]

Hello

I can confirm the reproduction of this issue. Posting to that specific forum will reproduce the issue in the case of the Firefox browser, but not the Chrome browser.
Proof: https://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/site-help-feedback-discussions/206113-test.html#post704619

Thank you for your contribution!

Comment 2

[Masayuki Nakano [:masayuki] (he/him)(JST, +0900)]

Looks like that this is not our bug, this must be a bug of the forum.

When I access the post form with Google Chrome, there is only <textarea> without a button to switch editor to rich text editor. However, when I access it with Firefox Nightly, rich text editor is created by default, and I see a toggle button at top-right corner of the form to switch it to <textarea>. When I switch the editor to <textarea>, <div> elements are converted to <br> elements. I guess that same conversion is used at posting since no posts in the example thread do not have <div> for line breaks. So, this must be the converter's bug which run only with Firefox.

Comment 3

[Masayuki Nakano [:masayuki] (he/him)(JST, +0900)]

If the forum wants to keep using traditional behavior rather fixing the converter, they should do:

try {
  document.execCommand("defaultparagraphseparator", false, "br");
} catch (e) {
  // ignore exception which does not support "defaultparagraphseparator"
  // command or a non-standardized value, "br"
}

Comment 4

[Oana Arbuzov [:oanaarbuzov]]

This issue seems to be fixed now.
https://prnt.sc/wozhsj
https://prnt.sc/wozimu
https://prnt.sc/wozl7e
https://prnt.sc/wp1i73

Tested with:
Browser / Version: Firefox Nightly 86.0a1 (2021-01-15)
Operating System: Windows 10 Pro

Jonas Larsson can you still reproduce it on your side?

Comment 5

[Jonas Larsson]

Hi Oana,

I just tried it with Firefox 84.0.2 (64 bit) (said to be up-to-date) on my Windows 8.1 computer. First I did "about:config" in my Firefox browser and changed back editor.use_div_for_default_newlines to true, which I think is the default. Then I posted a test message here:

https://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/site-help-feedback-discussions/206113-test.html#post793433

As you can see Firefox still gives extra line-breaks with the default setting "editor.use_div_for_default_newlines true", so the problem is still there for vBulletin 3.8 based forums, at least on Firefox 84.0.2 (64-bit). I saw that you had used a more recent development version of Firefox.

Comment 6

[Jonas Larsson]

(In reply to Oana Arbuzov [:oanaarbuzov] from comment #4)
I just tried it with Firefox 84.0.2 (64 bit) (said to be up-to-date) on my Windows 8.1 computer. First I did "about:config" in my Firefox browser and changed back editor.use_div_for_default_newlines to true, which I think is the default. Then I posted a test message here:

https://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/site-help-feedback-discussions/206113-test.html#post793433

As you can see Firefox still gives extra line-breaks with the default setting "editor.use_div_for_default_newlines true", so the problem is still there for vBulletin 3.8 based forums, at least on Firefox 84.0.2 (64-bit). I saw that you had used a more recent development version of Firefox.

I also tried with "editor.use_div_for_default_newlines false", and then it works correctly as you can see here:

https://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/site-help-feedback-discussions/206113-test.html#post793436