For some reason, Blogger.com doesn't seem to play nice with comments on Firefox (and surprisingly not Internet Explorer). It's taken me a good while to sit down and figure out whats wrong.
There isn't much information on the net regarding this bug that I could find, and all the pages seem to link back to this one post, which basically has summed up all the symptoms I've noticed.
What a frikken annoying bug this has turned out to be.
Symptoms
- Copy/Paste doesn't work
- Right clicking on the text field shows no options Undo/Cut/Copy/Paste/Delete/Select All
- Home/End keys don't work
- Arrow keys (up, down, left, right) keys don't work
- Selecting all by pressing CTRL+A doesn't work
Just in case you didn't believe it
Steps to produce
- In your Blogger account settings, set the comments to "embedded below post"
- Sign out of your account
- Turn off any ad-blockers you may have
- Using Firefox, view post and enter a comment
- Try to copy or paste from the form
Affects
- Firefox 3.5.7 (at time of writing)
- All platforms
Problem?
I was wondering why ad-blocker had to be off for this to happen. After some trial and error, I found the culprit.
For some reason, a gif file loaded by Google Analytics was causing the textbox bug.
The file is loaded at:
http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?...
Where "..." is a whole bunch of tracking information that records your information.
Blocking this file specifically will stop this bug from occurring, but will probably prevent Analytics from working.
I'm still unsure why being signed in or previewing alleviates the problem.
Solution
Not too sure. I tried removing the image using jQuery but the image isn't actually part of the page, so that doesn't help.
Until Mozilla decides to get around to fixing it, you pretty much have two solutions.
On one hand you can make the comments appear in a popup, which is uber annoying.
On the other, you can stop using Google Analytics.
If you wish to keep using both, leave a message for users to either sign in or preview comments before submitting. This way, it re-enables copy/paste in the form.
If you have any other solutions, feel free to let me know!
