Can't type some special characters in text fields

Hi,

Using Tor Browser 5.0.3, I can't type some characters from my French keyboard like ê (and ï) which suppose you first type the circumflex key and then the 'e' key. I've tested both the English and French version of the browser, with javascript on and off.

I'm running TB in Trisquel 7 linux. This OS is very similar to Ubuntu 14.04 with a Gnome Flashback desktop.

Thanks for your help :)

Trac:
Username: etienne

added TorBrowserTeam201510R component::applications/tor browser owner::arthuredelstein priority::medium reporter::etienne resolution::fixed severity::normal status::closed tbb-regression tbb-usability type::defect labels

My first guess is this is fallout from #15646 (moved). Does the alpha version work for you? Does 5.0.2 (https://dist.torproject.org/torbrowser/5.0.2/)?

Trac:
Cc: N/A to arthuredelstein
Keywords: accent special character french deleted, tbb-fingerprinting, tbb-regression, TorBrowserTeam201510 added
Owner: N/A to tbb-team
Component: - Select a component to Tor Browser

Trac:
Username: klonido
Keywords: N/A deleted, tbb-privacy-locale, localization, tbb-fingerprinting-locale added

Thanks for the additional keywords. But the ones I added are already enough to put this bug into the proper category.

Trac:
Keywords: tbb-privacy-locale, localization, tbb-fingerprinting-locale deleted, N/A added

I've tested TB 5.0.2 and 5.5a3 (64 bits too) and had the same results.

But the 5.0.3 version I have on a KDE desktop on Debian is OK, so it has to do with Trisquel or with my configuration. Strange enough ... cause I have no trouble on the same system with Icecat or Abrowser which are based on Firefox just like TB.

Trac:
Username: etienne

Trac:
Keywords: tbb-fingerprinting, tbb-regression, TorBrowserTeam201510 deleted, tbb-usability added

Trac:
Owner: tbb-team to arthuredelstein
Status: new to assigned

I was able to reproduce this bug on standard Ubuntu 14.10 (Unity desktop), by setting the default keyboard layout to French.

By running a binary search over commits, I found this bug is caused by our patch for "Bug #5926 (moved): Allow JS locale to be set to English/C".

If I set the pref introduced by that patch, "javascript.use_us_english_locale", to false, and restart Tor Browser, it becomes possible to type these French special characters again.

The next step is to figure out how the patch causes this.

Trac:
Severity: N/A to Normal

Trac:
Keywords: N/A deleted, tbb-regression added

Here's a patch to fix this problem, for review:

https://github.com/arthuredelstein/tor-browser/commit/37d4e243f7ed4844e4b2388850b695aeea7ec9e8

It turns out that, on some Linux systems, using the "C" locale prevents keyboard input of non-ASCII characters.

If we use the "C.UTF-8" locale instead, then the keyboard input problem goes away. Windows does not have a "C.UTF-8" locale, so, in this patch, will fall back to the "C" locale (which is available on every system). On Windows, I confirmed that with the "C" locale, there is no keyboard input problem for international characters (such as the French special characters reported).

There is a concern that some odd versions of Linux may also lack a "C.UTF-8" locale. In this case, formatting by the "C" locale is distinguishable from the "C.UTF-8" locale. In order to fully avoid this problem, I think we would need to re-implement the various methods of Date (see #17355 (moved)).

Trac:
Status: assigned to needs_review

Trac:
Keywords: N/A deleted, TorBrowserTeam201510R added

Could you please add a comment above the new code explaining what it does/why it is needed (and maybe referring to this ticket for more details)?

Trac:
Status: needs_review to needs_revision

Replying to gk:

Could you please add a comment above the new code explaining what it does/why it is needed (and maybe referring to this ticket for more details)?

Good idea. Here's the new version: https://github.com/arthuredelstein/tor-browser/commit/17329+2

Trac:
Status: needs_revision to needs_review

Looks good to me.

Trac:
Cc: arthuredelstein to arthuredelstein, mcs, brade

r=mcs I did not test this patch, but the reasoning and code seem sound.

This is commit 6e22e68547b2bac647c5a9c4e2c43eda2dc1c63b on tor-browser-38.3.0esr-5.5-2 and commit 6d36430a07b75db21fb4007f28cceb98adc23f35 on tor-browser-38.3.0esr-5.0-2, thanks.

Trac:
Resolution: N/A to fixed
Status: needs_review to closed

This bug was reported for Linux platform, while fix changes code for all supported platforms. Why Mozilla so hard tries to detect default C locale to change it to "", specially for Windows?

closed

mentioned in issue #17355 (moved)

moved to tpo/applications/tor-browser#17329 (closed)

mentioned in issue tpo/applications/tor-browser#17355 (closed)