Word boundaries not properly recognized in Firefox?

[jamadagni]

I’m using Tumbleweed but I don’t think this is a TW problem because I had it even before upgrading to TW from 13.2 so I’m posting this here.

I just now reported this problem at: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=2898857:

@jamadagni

This is a problem I’m observing on Firefox (latest 34.0.5) on openSUSE Tumbleweed, but not on any other GTK/non-GTK apps on the same OS, or on Firefox on Ubuntu or Windows.

If I have a URL such as https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox (or really any other textual passage including non-alphanum chars between alphanum chars in a string without spaces) then if I try to navigate the text using Ctrl+LeftArrow/RightArrow, then on the non-problem cases, the cursor stops at the non-alphanumeric character i.e. slash or colon or hash, but in the problem case, whether in the URL bar or anywhere else (such as the textbox where I’m typing this) the same is not working.

…but I downloaded the Firefox 34.0.5 build from the Mozilla site and it is working correctly, so I guess it’s something to do with the openSUSE build of Firefox so I really shouldn’t have asked it over at MozillaZine…

Please advise as to how I can rectify this problem or should I report this as a bug. Thanks!

[tsu2]

Just tested what you described on my FF (13.2, FF v33)

I don’t see and can’t verify what you described.
CTL-LFT-Arrow Worked flawlessly for both words and numbers
CTL-RT-Arrow Worked flawlessly for words, curiously skipped over numbers to the next word. After skipping over the number, I could “CTL-LFT-Arrow” back to the number

For a continuous string of alphanumeric like a URL, the entire string is treated as a single word.
If there is any bugginess, it looks like after a long mixed string like a URL, the cursor sometimes appears at the beginning, other times at the end of a word, then after a few more movements fixes itself.

TSU

[jamadagni]

@tsu2

Just tested what you described on my FF (13.2, FF v33)

I don’t see and can’t verify what you described.
CTL-LFT-Arrow Worked flawlessly for both words and numbers
CTL-RT-Arrow Worked flawlessly for words, curiously skipped over numbers to the next word. After skipping over the number, I could “CTL-LFT-Arrow” back to the number

For a continuous string of alphanumeric like a URL, the entire string is treated as a single word.
If there is any bugginess, it looks like after a long mixed string like a URL, the cursor sometimes appears at the beginning, other times at the end of a word, then after a few more movements fixes itself.

TSU

Thanks for replying but perhaps you should re-read the OP. The cursor is supposed to stop at non-alphanumeric characters. You are talking about “words and numbers” alone. Point blank question: for a URL or such like https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox does the cursor stop at the slashes, hash etc or not when navigating with Ctrl+[Left|Right]Arrow?

[hcvv]

I never heard/read about this feature. But your last post induced me in checking if I understand you. Apperently you talk about manoeuvring through the address bar of the browser. When I go to the URL you gave above and then enter the address bar and then use the left and right arrow keys while holding down the Ctrl key, the cursor jump left/right and stops after (at the right side off) a non-alphanumeric charcacter or group of characters. E.G. when the cursor is at the begin/left of the URL and I use Ctrl-RightArrow, the cursor is then after the :// .Repeating lets it stop at the right of the . in the host/domainname, then the /, the ?, the =, the &, etc. and at last after the #.

Is that what you expect to happen?

[jamadagni]

@hcvv

I never heard/read about this feature. But your last post induced me in checking if I understand you. Apperently you talk about manoeuvring through the address bar of the browser. When I go to the URL you gave above and then enter the address bar and then use the left and right arrow keys while holding down the Ctrl key, the cursor jump left/right and stops after (at the right side off) a non-alphanumeric charcacter or group of characters. E.G. when the cursor is at the begin/left of the URL and I use Ctrl-RightArrow, the cursor is then after the :// .Repeating lets it stop at the right of the . in the host/domainname, then the /, the ?, the =, the &, etc. and at last after the #.

Is that what you expect to happen?

Yes but are you saying that’s what’s already happening for you? Right now I’m using Tumbleweed but I saw this on basic 13.2 as well, and even on Tumbleweed if I use the upstream Firefox then it’s working fine.

[tsu2]

@jamadagni

Thanks for replying but perhaps you should re-read the OP. The cursor is supposed to stop at non-alphanumeric characters. You are talking about “words and numbers” alone. Point blank question: for a URL or such like https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox does the cursor stop at the slashes, hash etc or not when navigating with Ctrl+[Left|Right]Arrow?

Re-reading my post, I used “word” when I really meant “text-word”

Expected Behavior
CTL-LFT-Arrow “tab” character block leftwards.
Worked as expected for both text and numerical characters
With each action, the cursor moved to the next block of characters rightwards.

CTL-RT-Arrow “tab” character block rightwards
Mostly worked as expected. Seemed to work flawlessly for all text only blocks.
With numerical and mixed blocks, sometimes the cursor skipped a block or ended up on the rt side of the block instead of the left side of the block(this is probably a code bug). When this happened, I did a few CTL-LFT-Arrow “tabs” and the cursor position resolved itself.

As I described in my post, in your URL example (which I also referenced in my earlier post), the entire URL is treated as a single block of characters because it appears this function is space-delimited and ordinarily URLs are expressed without spaces(often using the escape character %20 to denote a space).

TSU

[hcvv]

@jamadagni

Yes but are you saying that’s what’s already happening for you? .

This is what I see right before my eyes in openSUSE 13.1, KDE 4.11.5 and Firefox 34.0.5.

I am not talking about Tumbleweed because I do not have it (and this is NOT in the Tumbleweed forum).

[palswim]

Apparently, Firefox has had this issue since at least 2003 (and the request remains even though the bug reports claim completion).

You just have to set the pref

layout.word_select.stop_at_punctuation

to

true