1607115 - In macOS versions of FF, the core macOS feature of text/glyph substitution is blocked/unimplemented for text fields

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1149826

(Core :: Widget: Cocoa, defect, P3)

Description

[Alastair Leith]

Attachment: before and after macOS text substitution is enacted in Safari (and most other apps)

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:71.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/71.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. Make sure you have at least on text substitution in your system preferences (there are default cases, I will use the "&shrug" default case which converts any instance where the user types "&shrug" to "¯_(ツ)_/¯."

2. load a webpage (eg duckduckgo.com) that has a text input field.

3. type "&shrug" into the search query text field

N.B> the "¯_(ツ)_/¯." substitution is a trivial example however I have loaded dozens of shortcut links to urls that I frequently post on SM (hence needing it to work in FF as well as all my text editors) and shortcuts for non-ASCII glyphs that would otherwise take time to paste in with macOS Text Glyph tools. eg
CH4 ➞ CH₄
gwp20 ➞ GWP₂₀
Gwp100 ➞ GWP₁₀₀
"->" ➞ "➝⤑➞ " (i can delete the arrows I don't wish to use leaving the style I want to use)

iCloud also sync these keyboard substitutions across multiple macOS and iOS devices, which is great because iOS lacks the sophisticated glyph substitutions that macOS has with Edit Menu > Emoji & Symbols…)

Actual results:

1. Nothing

Expected results:

1. the "&shrug" text is converted on the fly to "¯_(ツ)_/¯." (it also appears as a text in a clickable box below the typed text prior to text conversion. When there's multiple suggestions, this also allows for user to click one of several options. See screenshots before and after in Safari.

Comment 1

[Alastair Leith]

screenshot of macOS system preference item where substitutions are defined:

link : https://my.pcloud.com/publink/show?code=XZDeOukZ5G6QspRB2AX6agUKm4s0TYsA9S77

Comment 2

[Alastair Leith]

This bug not to be confused with this (also) long existing bug: Bug 1284892:
Add support for Mac: text areas and text fields: contextual menu: Substitutions

Comment 3

[Alastair Leith]

Attachment: macOS System Prefs… > Keyboard > Text tab for defining text subsitutions which FF ideally should respect as Safari does

where text substitutions are defined in macOS for system wide text substitution (and synced to other iOS and macOS devices).

Comment 4

[Daniel Kolsis]

Hello, macOS text substitution functionality is indeed not working in Firefox. Note that this functionality is also not present when using Google Chrome.

Comment 5

[ELLIOTTCABLE]

This is maybe the biggest issue on macOS which makes FireFox feel "second-class" or third-party. Pretty much all other important apps support text-substitution and glyph-entry natively; the cohort including FireFox that don't support it are almost exclusively poorly-ported Qt apps and similar UX disasters.

The severity and priority of this bug should absolutely be higher, it's severely impacting the user-penetration amongst macOS users. /=

Comment 6

[Alastair Leith]

Agree with comments above. After a week of using. Firefox i return to safari. Even thought the 1Password account add on works in Firefox and doesn’t work Safari and I use 1paasword all the time (I use the native 1Password and copy the login pair then return to Firefox and paste using clipboard history). But even with this in incentive the pain of going to a dumb app like TextEdit just to get a substitution is pathetic. It’s so annoying it turns me off Firefox completely. I just used Firefox for an entire week online all day everyday and I’m over it. Back to Safari. Sorry. This is a priority one UX/UI issue as far as I’m concerned. Maybe you have other priorities but if you value Mac user loyalty I’d think about it again.

Comment 7

[Julius Himmler]

Please fix this. Text replacement can be so useful. Very unfortunate it doesn't work in Firefox!

Comment 8

[Oleksandr]

As of November 2022 Google Chrome also supports this feature, which leaves Firefox the only major browser on macos that doesn't.

Comment 9

[Maxx Crawford [:maxx]]

Caveat: This comment's solution is theoretical and a starting point.

I ran into this issue and contacted a coworker (:gregtatum) about how this feature works on OSX. Sharing some of our conversation here, along with links to how Chrome implemented it.

First - here's the overall concept and process from Apple.

How Chrome implements it:

• The main implementation is here: content/app_shim_remote_cocoa/render_widget_host_view_cocoa.mm.
• They set the menu item(s) here: chrome/browser/ui/cocoa/main_menu_builder.mm
• See all references to automaticTextReplacement

Caveats/notes:

• Firefox uses its own spell checking and dictionary system (as opposed to Apple's nsspellchecker) and you'd probably have to build on top of, and select the OS-dictionaries.
• This feature includes other text replacement features (Smart dash/quote replacement, etc) that would have to be implemented along side it.

Again, this isn't a step-by-step guide on how to do it, but some (hopefully) helpful context for future travelers.

Comment 10

[Alastair Leith]

(In reply to Maxx Crawford [:mcrawford :maxx :maxxcrawford] from comment #9)

Caveat: This comment's solution is theoretical and a starting point.

I ran into this issue and contacted a coworker (:gregtatum) about how this feature works on OSX. Sharing some of our conversation here, along with links to how Chrome implemented it.

First - here's the overall concept and process from Apple.

How Chrome implements it:

• The main implementation is here: content/app_shim_remote_cocoa/render_widget_host_view_cocoa.mm.
• They set the menu item(s) here: chrome/browser/ui/cocoa/main_menu_builder.mm
• See all references to automaticTextReplacement

Caveats/notes:

• Firefox uses its own spell checking and dictionary system (as opposed to Apple's nsspellchecker) and you'd probably have to build on top of, and select the OS-dictionaries.
• This feature includes other text replacement features (Smart dash/quote replacement, etc) that would have to be implemented along side it.

Again, this isn't a step-by-step guide on how to do it, but some (hopefully) helpful context for future travelers.

Thanks for trying to help move this forward Maxx. Clearly macOS users are second-class citizens as far as the developers of FireFox are concerned. this has been an issue for me since, decades ago.

Comment 11

[Alastair Leith]

(In reply to Alastair Leith from comment #10)

(In reply to Maxx Crawford [:mcrawford :maxx :maxxcrawford] from comment #9)

Caveat: This comment's solution is theoretical and a starting point.

I ran into this issue and contacted a coworker (:gregtatum) about how this feature works on OSX. Sharing some of our conversation here, along with links to how Chrome implemented it.

First - here's the overall concept and process from Apple.

How Chrome implements it:

• The main implementation is here: content/app_shim_remote_cocoa/render_widget_host_view_cocoa.mm.
• They set the menu item(s) here: chrome/browser/ui/cocoa/main_menu_builder.mm
• See all references to automaticTextReplacement

Caveats/notes:

• Firefox uses its own spell checking and dictionary system (as opposed to Apple's nsspellchecker) and you'd probably have to build on top of, and select the OS-dictionaries.
• This feature includes other text replacement features (Smart dash/quote replacement, etc) that would have to be implemented along side it.

Again, this isn't a step-by-step guide on how to do it, but some (hopefully) helpful context for future travelers.

Thanks for trying to help move this forward @Maxx. Clearly macOS users are second-class citizens as far as the developers of FireFox are concerned. this has been an issue for me since, decades ago.

Comment 12

[Alastair Leith]

My preference is that Firefox does build on top of Apples nsspellerchecker, it seems to work better than FireFox's for me and at least its consistent with other macOS apps, and shares the user dictionary which is a non-trivial point of friction suing FireFox's dictionary. I feels like this change might have been made recently, the contextual menu in FireFox now looks more like it does in Safari.

Comment 13

[GoldenBugatti]

(In reply to Alastair Leith from comment #10)

Clearly macOS users are second-class citizens as far as the developers of FireFox are concerned.

You seem to be right. This is very disappointing. After a few issues like this, I am, unbelievably, considering switching back to the Hated Google Product.

Comment 14

[Stepan Kuzmin]

This looks like a duplicate of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1149826

Comment 15

[Stephen A Pohl [:spohl]]

Thanks!