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Browser spellchecking broken in VE for words with special characters
Closed, ResolvedPublic

Description

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Install a German dictionary for spellchecking in your browser.
  2. Open any page in German Wikipedia for editing.
  3. Enter some words with umlauts.

Expected:
The spell checking works normal.

Actual:
VE seems to insert some invisible word breaks before the umlauts, breaking the spell checking:

Screenshot_2019-12-10 „Benutzer Schnark“ – Bearbeiten – Wikipedia.png (65×370 px, 1 KB)

Note that only the "ür" is highlighted.

If you move the focus away and back again, the spell checking is corrected for words already entered (as seen in the screenshot), but will be broken again for new words.

This doesn't happen in plain inputs, and not on non-VE content editable texts, so I assume that this isn't a Firefox issue, but a problem with VE.

Event Timeline

VE seems to insert some invisible word breaks before the umlauts

What are you seeing in the DOM? An actual <span> or a segmented text node, or neither?

The DOM has just the plain text (and as far as I can tell there are no invisible format characters, either). The funny thing is: When I copy the affected HTML from VE to another contenteditable page, the spellchecking is broken there, too, even for newly entered text, but only inside the copied list item, not in new ones like it happens in VE.
So this might well be a bug in Firefox, and VE just more easily triggers it than a plain contenteditable. I'll try to investigate further and report it upstream if it turns out that the issue is not in VE.

Now at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1602526, so this definitely is a bug in Firefox, not in VE. Do we keep upstream bugs open here until they are fixed?

@Schnark The Firefox bug was marked fixed, is this resolved now?

It says it is fixed in FF 73, which is supposed to be released on February 11, as far as I know. With the current version, the bug is still reproducible.

As expected, I'm no longer able to reproduce this issue.