Last modified: 2012-10-01 04:05:26 UTC
When placing my cursor on the 'Search' field in the upper right corner my 'end'- key neither my 'arrow-right' key work. I can overtype the word 'Search', and then the keys do work.
The report is about Firefox 15.0.1; the problem has started in the last few days according to the reporter. I've just reproduced it on nl.wiki and en.wiki (wmf11) plus en.quote (wmf12): basically the search field is completely freezed, arrow keys or mouse or whatever can't affect it. As far as I can remember, the "Search" used to be greyed out and discreet.
Does only concern the 'Vector' skin - changing to 'Monobook' resolves the problem
Changing platform back: as I said I reproduced it with GNU/Linux, Firefox 15.0.
What you are describing is the native behaviour of the new "placeholder" attribute (http://www.w3.org/TR/html-markup/input.text.html#input.text.attrs.placeholder). See also Bug #40464. Recommend WONTFIX since this is browser-dependent. See http://caniuse.com/#feat=input-placeholder. Opera, for instance, removes the text when you click on the box (tested on my own placeholder attribute, not en.wiki).
Wont fix, indeed. For browsers that support placeholder, the jquery.placeholder plugin does nothing but letting the native implemented behaviour do its thing (so that any native handling goes exactly the way the user expects it from their browser). Originally (like Opera still does) most browsers (including Chrome and Firefox) hid the placeholder on-focus, but now that it has been specified by W3 (which says to hide it when it becomes non-empty) most browsers have released updates that make their implementation follow the specification instead (Opera is a bit behind, it seems). The change you saw in your browser isn't from our side but from your browser. Having said that, we do implement a fallback for older browsers that didn't support placeholder yet. In our fallback we hide it on-focus (just like Chrome/Firefox used to do), so perhaps we should update our fallback as well :) I would re-purpose this bug for that, however since it would request implementation of what is basically the opposite of what this bug requests, I've filed a bug new bug instead (bug 40645).
Marking invalid instead of wonfix. Our implementation actually does hide when focussing an empty element. The reason it isn't happening (as it shouldn't) is because the user uses a modern browser that implements the described behaviour natively.
please, i'm just a nontechnical user. my bugreport seems to be invalid and you do not want to fix it? ok, but just explain to me in normal words what and how and why?
Okay, simple version: * There is an international organisation that creates standards for the internet (e.g. they decide that <b> should turn text into bold, and that clicking a text field should focus it for typing text etc.). This organisation is called W3C. * W3C has decided that a placeholder should be visible whenever the value of the text input is empty. That means when clicking on it to put the cursor inside, until text is entered, the placeholder will remain visible. This will make it possible (for example) to read the placeholder text even if the search field is auto-focussed. * Until recently Firefox and Chrome had their own version, they have now updated their code to match the W3C guidelines. This means that we now see the placeholder when the field is active without text in it. If you don't like that, please complain to Firefox or W3C and explain why. This is not something we can or should fix. It is not in our control. This change was not made by MediaWiki, it was made by your browser.
