There’s a really bad behaviour of Firefox when pasting a text containing non‐breaking spaces ( ): these special characters are converted into normal spaces. That’s completely useless considering that the thin spaces ( ) are not converted! The problem has been reported upstream as bug #359303 thirteen years ago, and it’s still not fixed! Actually, it is considered to be a “feature”! I think that nowadays it’s rather a very annoying bug. I can enter this special space with my keyboard in a text field, but I can’t paste a text containing it in the same field ; and if I paste something containing a thin space, it works. What a strange design! All Firefox versions are concerned. Steps to Reproduce: 1. copy a document containing non-breaking [ ] and thin spaces [ ], for example from Gedit editor with the “Draw spaces” plugin activated (Gedit → Preferences → Plugins → Draw spaces, then click on Preferences button and check “Draw non-breaking spaces”), so you can see them; 2. select the text with the special characters, copy it and paste it in a Firefox form input (text or textarea); 3. now copy the pasted text form the Firefox input back to Gedit, you’ll see that non-breaking spaces have been replaced by normal spaces whereas thin spaces are still there. The trivial patch here attached has been proposed. It would be nice to see this insane behaviour nuked a least from Mageia!
Created attachment 11247 [details] Remove non-breaking spaces conversion when pasting text into a form field
I think this is best done upstream. I registered there just to express my support on the bug. Davy, if you like to push this forward, maybe register at other distributions forums/bugzillas and see if you can get support, and make some people express upstream. That must be much more appealing than every distro patching Firefox, which i read is not trivial, plus delays every update from distro and makes more work. Thank you for bringing this up.
CC: (none) => friKeywords: (none) => UPSTREAM
Thank you for your support Morgan. Of course this *has* to be fixed upstream rather than per distro (and even outside the GNU/Linux ecosystem). But after 13 years, I’m really pessimistic about me being persuasive enough…
Hi, thanks for reporting this bug. Upstream bug. Annoying despite 14 years of report. Seems we can't fix this by ourselves. Closing this.
CC: (none) => ouaurelienResolution: (none) => WONTFIXStatus: NEW => RESOLVEDKeywords: (none) => Triaged