327870 - crash entering right-to-left text

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Mikel Ward]

I have the Google Australia personalized home page as my home page.

I had opened a new window, started typing in the main search box, then must have accidentally pressed something, as my text started being entered backwards.

I assumed I had pressed a control key sequence (something like Ctrl-R) that enabled right-to-left text entry.

I tried a few key combinations such as Ctrl-R to revert the text order (unsuccessfully), then I pressed Del quickly a few times to erase the incorrect text, when Firefox crashed with an invalid memory reference.

Unfortunately TalkBack doesn't work from behind my proxy, so I can't provide any trace.

Comment 1

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

It should be possible to configure the Talkback client to use your proxy to connect. There are proxy configuration options in the settings dialog once you run the client itself (talkback.exe).

Is the problem reproducible? Which build are you using?

Comment 2

[Mikel Ward]

My proxy requires authentication, which seems to cause Talkback to fail.

I've searched the documentation but I can't find the keyboard combination to enable RTL.  Do you know what it is?

I'm using the 1.5.0.1 release.

Comment 3

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

There isn't a shortcut key to "enable RTL", far as I know. The "typing backwards" effect has been known to happen under heavy CPU load, though, or when Java applets like the one at runescape.com are used (see bug 256763).

Comment 4

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

(In reply to comment #3)
> There isn't a shortcut key to "enable RTL", far as I know.

Seems I was wrong: I've been told that: "if you have BiDi UI enabled (either by changing your OS Locale or by setting bidi.browser.ui to true), it's Accel+Shift+X". Maybe you could try that?

Comment 5

[Mikel Ward]

Accel is Control on Windows, isn't it?

No, Ctrl-Shift-X doesn't have that effect.  Indeed, it is also used by the Web Developer toolbar to mean zoom out.

Perhaps the crash is caused by the conflict.

I also note that bidi.browser.ui is false.

Comment 6

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

By the way, no key sequence should cause text entry to reverse direction. Accel-Shift-X changes the default directionality of an entry field, but that doesn't mean that English will suddenly become right-to-left.

Comment 7

[Jesse Ruderman on Windows]

It does mean fun things might happen if you type punctuation, though.

There's not enough information in this bug report to figure out what went wrong, so I'm marking it as incomplete.  If you hit this again, we'd love steps or a stack.