506866 - PDF Focus lost in Firefox when switching windows/tabs

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: DOM: UI Events & Focus Handling, defect, P3)

Description

[David McMahon]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.12) Gecko/2009070611 Firefox/3.0.12 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.12) Gecko/2009070611 Firefox/3.0.12 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

PROBLEM:
When opening a fillable PDF in Firefox, entering one of the text fields with the cursor, and then leaving the browser open, opening another application/window, bringing focus away from Firefox, and then returning to the PDF in Firefox, the keyboard focus is lost, i.e. if you start typing, no chars appear in the PDF, until you again select a field. This works in Internet Explorer.

IMPACT:
This is causing major problems for large enterprises, as they often work with PDF only in the browser. The internal users often work the entire day in the browser filling PDFs so behaviour like this disrupts their work a great deal, i.e. they cannot copy and paste as in IE.
I have a very important enterprise client (200,000 desktops) who would like to switch from IE to Firefox as their strategic browser, but this issue has been identified as one of the main blockers. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. create a simple PDF in Adobe Designer with some text fields (I will try to upload a sample PDF to this bug)
2. open this PDF in Firefox
3. put the mouse cursor in a text field
4. open another application/window
5. return to the PDF in Firefox
6. type some chars on the keyboard
Actual Results:  
no text appears in field

Expected Results:  
text to appear in field, focus maintained coming back into firefox 

RESEARCH:
I could not find an exact bug match in bugzilla. You need the Acrobat plugin to display PDFs in Firefox, and enable "Display PDF in Browser" in the Acrobat Internet Preferences.
problem occurs on FF2.0.0.12, FF3.0.3, FF3.0.11, FF3.0.12, FF3.5.1
problem does not occur on IE6, IE7
tested with Acrobat 7, 8, 9
There is a bug logged with Adobe (2351265), however it seems this fix must come (at least in part) from Firefox.

A fixpack for FF3.0 (e.g. 3.0.x) would be preferred.

Comment 1

[David McMahon]

Attachment: test PDF files

Comment 2

[Michael Ryan]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090727 Minefield/3.6a1pre

Behavior that I'm seeing:
static.pdf - When switching back to Firefox, no text appears in field when typing. In order to get the focus back, you must click on another field and then click back to the previous field.
static.pdf - When switching back to Firefox, no text appears in field when typing. Clicking on the field will return focus to that field.

Comment 3

[Michael Ryan]

(In reply to comment #2)
Whoops, that second one should be "dynamic.pdf".

Comment 4

[David McMahon]

That is the problem behaviour with static PDFs.  You have to click on another field, then click back into the correct field, and then the keyboard focus will be back in the PDF and in the correct field.
With dynamic PDFs the behaviour is a little better in that you just need to click into the same field again and the keyboard focus will return.

In both situations however, it does not match the IE behaviour, which is how customers expect it to work, i.e. returning mouse focus to the browser window should return the keyboard focus also, to the last known position.

Comment 5

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Moving to p3 because no activity for at least 1 year(s).
See https://github.com/mozilla/bug-handling/blob/master/policy/triage-bugzilla.md#how-do-you-triage for more information

Comment 6

[Andrei Purice]

Marking this as Resolved > Worksforme since it cannot be reproduced anymore on the latest versions of Firefox Nightly 96.0a1 (2021-11-09) , beta 95.0b4 or release 94.0.1 on Windows 10.
If anyone can still reproduce this issue please re-open the bug or file a new one.