434304 - Caret Oddity (bidi caret being shown when it should not be?)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 418513

(Core :: Internationalization, defect)

Description

[Infrared]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-GB; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008051202 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-GB; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008051202 Firefox/3.0

The cursor looks similar to a lower case 't' when it's placed in some
text entry fields. In particular, it always happens in the Google News
search field, but very rarely in other fields.

The thread here has more details, including a screenshot image I made of
an affected cursor:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=5453308

This is a very minor quirk and does not affect usability in any obvious way.
It has been present in several versions of FF going back to 2.0.x and perhaps 
before.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[cris]

reproduce
1. open firefox and goto http://news.google.co.uk/
2. click the search field at top of the page and call up focus ring and flashing cursor

I can only confirm this on OSX, but may affect other platforms as well.

Comment 2

[cris]

Attachment: the screenshot of the problem created by OP

Comment 4

[Kai Liu]

What you are seeing is the bidi cursor, and if your system supports RTL input, then what you see is normal.  There was a problem in Firefox 2 where the bidi cursor would appear even if your system did not support RTL, but that was fixed by bug 272096 and bug 288839 for Firefox 3.

So...
* if your system supports RTL, then this is the expected behavior
* if your system does not support RTL and you see this in Firefox 2, then it's a known problem
* if your system does not support RTL and you see this in Firefox 3, then it's a new problem since this was supposed to have been fixed (and is indeed fixed on Windows)

Comment 5

[cris]

well, This is confirmed at least on leopard. And safari doesn't do this.

I am not sure to say its "normal" or not really help the situation.... Its a search field, a cursor with strange shape.... I think most users would consider it "abnormal", no matter what underline explanation might be..

Of course, its a very minor issue indeed.

Comment 6

[Kai Liu]

Changed product from Firefox to Core:i18n (as that's where the other bidi cursor bugs went)

Comment 8

[Infrared]

What I don't quite understand is the relationship between the
search field and what appears elsewhere on the page. The mere
appearance of a small amount of foreign language text on the
webpage causes the bidi cursor to appear. It's not my text
that causes this. It doesn't mean I am about to type in that
foreign language. It doesn't mean I'm any more in need of
knowing which way my text is heading than I was before (i.e.,
when looking at other pages where the bidi cursor didn't
appear). And my keyboard layout hasn't changed.