764696 - [10.8] "Start Dictation" item added multiple times to Firefox's Edit menu (starting in DP4)

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Widget: Cocoa, defect)

Description

[Marcia Knous [:marcia]]

Attachment: Screenshot of issue as seen on Nightly

Seen while running Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:16.0) Gecko/16.0 Firefox/16.0a1

STR:
1. Load a nightly Firefox build or the latest Firefox beta
2. Go to Edit menu
3. Observe attached screenshot

Running the latest Apple 10.8 seed 12A239. The menu issue does not show using Chrome.

Comment 1

[Marcia Knous [:marcia]]

I did not change any System Preferences related to Dictation and Speech.

Comment 2

[Marcia Knous [:marcia]]

Adding David Bolter since he might know something about this feature.

Comment 3

[Marcia Knous [:marcia]]

Not able to reproduce off the bat using a clean Nightly or a clean FF 13 launch. I also see the same issue in Firefox 14 and Aurora which I am running at the same time.

After I restart Nightly using the original profile where I saw it, the menu goes back to normal, but slowly the instances grow in the menu over time.

"fn" "fn" is listed as the keyboard shortcut in Safari for this feature but I haven't touched that keyboard key at all.

Odd, but something I am doing is causing the instances of that menu item to grow as I continue to use the browser.

Comment 4

[Marcia Knous [:marcia]]

I can now reproduce the issue in a clean nightly profile as well. But I still haven't figured out what is causing the menu items to increment.

Comment 5

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

The feature is basically the dictation part of Siri, known from the iOS operating system.

Marcia, this always becomes active/available when focus lands in a text field. This could be the awesome bar, search box, or any part of the web where's an input @type="text" or textarea involved. Perhaps this will help you narrow down the issue, e. g., the number always increases if you focus a field in which you can type.

Comment 6

[David Bolter [:davidb] (NeedInfo me for attention)]

Adding in Hub in case he also has ideas.

Comment 7

[Marcia Knous [:marcia]]

Marco: Thanks. I will try to see which one of those input areas might be causing it. Also note that while this is happening the dictation feature is "Off" in System preferences. Apparently Siri has a mind of her own.

(In reply to Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ) from comment #5)
> The feature is basically the dictation part of Siri, known from the iOS
> operating system.
> 
> Marcia, this always becomes active/available when focus lands in a text
> field. This could be the awesome bar, search box, or any part of the web
> where's an input @type="text" or textarea involved. Perhaps this will help
> you narrow down the issue, e. g., the number always increases if you focus a
> field in which you can type.

Comment 8

[Hubert Figuiere [:hub]]

(In reply to David Bolter [:davidb] from comment #6)
> Adding in Hub in case he also has ideas.

May take? Look at how we create menus (I think it is in toolkit). 
I don't have MacOS 10.8 to try.

Also one iteresting thing to try would be to try the Firefox 13. Maybe they whitelist on the plist to work around the bug.

Comment 9

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

I find I get another "Start Dictation ..." item in the Edit menu every time I refocus a window (after clicking on the Desktop or another window).  All but one of these menu items disappears if I close all FF windows and open a new one.

I tested with FF 13 and today's mozilla-central nightly on DP4 (Build 12A239).

Surely this is an Apple bug, and new with DP4.  Otherwise we'd have noticed it before.

If I click on any of the "Start Dictation ..." menu items I'm prompted to enable Dictation.  So Siri's definitely rattling the bars of her cage :-)

Comment 10

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

The same thing happens with FF 12 (unsigned).  I got it to run by using "xattr -d com.apple.quarantine" to delete its quarantine extended attribute.

Comment 11

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

This bug doesn't effect Chrome, Safari or TextWrangler.  But all of them show the "fn fn" shortcut on the right side of the "Start Dictation ..." menu item.  Firefox doesn't, and I'll bet that's why this bug effects Firefox.

Comment 12

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

This bug also effects Thunderbird, which also doesn't display the "fn fn" shortcut in the menu item.

Comment 13

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

Another possible explanation for this bug is that Firefox (like Thunderbird) subclasses the NSMenu class -- so that all our menus belong to the GeckoNSMenu class.

Comment 14

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

But Adobe Reader also subclasses NSMenu (AVCocoaMainMenu and AVCocoaMenu), and it isn't effected by this bug.  However both Adobe Reader and Opera (also uneffected) subclass NSMenuItem, which we don't (except for items in the Services menu).

Note to self:  Try subclassing NSMenuItem and see if this makes a difference.

Comment 15

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

This is an Apple bug.  But if we're going to work around it, it'll be in Cocoa widgets code.

Comment 16

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

Bug report submitted to Apple:

Starting in OS X 10.8 DP4, a new "Start Dictation" menu item gets added to Firefox's Edit menu every time a browser window gets focused.  This happens even if dictation is disabled (as it is by default).

Firefox doesn't have native support for this menu item, so the OS must be adding it to Firefox's Edit menu.  The OS also adds this menu item to many other programs' Edit menus (though not to all of them -- for example Adobe Reader and Opera).  But the code that adds it to Firefox's Edit menu is broken -- it can't tell when the Edit menu already has a "Start Dictation" menu item.

This bug was reported at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=764696, and is being followed up there.

Comment 17

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

Any workaround we find for this bug will be a bodacious hack.  So I think we should wait to see Apple fixes it in the next Mountain Lion update.

Comment 18

[Stefan Arentz | :st3fan | ⏰ EST | he/him]

Just a note to say that other than the menu item thing, dictation works pretty well. It accepts dictation input in form fields, the location bar and the search box at the top and the search box at the bottom when searching page contents.

Comment 19

[Stefan Arentz | :st3fan | ⏰ EST | he/him]

Today Apple pushed out an update to 10.8DP4 (ony as an update through Software Update it seems, not as a download) that seems to have fixed this issue. After applying that update I can not manage to get multiple Start Dictation items anymore.

Comment 20

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

I can confirm that this is fixed in Apple's latest DP for Mountain Lion -- build 12A248.

Comment 21

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

Apologies for the bugspam, but all the right folks seem to be in this bug.

Thunderbird (and BlueGriffon and Postbox) have a bug related to Start Dictation and Special Characters - bug 1142556 - but it doesn't happen on Firefox.

Is there anything special Firefox does around this menu? To make it appear the first time (It seems focus related).