Android, Firefox, and Metafilter commenting December 9, 2013 8:31 AM   Subscribe

More and more I find myself visiting Metafilter on my Android tablet. I am using Firefox 25.0.1 on a Nexus 7 with Android 4.3. Recently, commenting has become almost impossible - namely, any kind of HTML tags get very screwed up. Typically, I'll copy a comment I want to reply to, surround that with em tags and then reply. Lately, in the process of posting, Android or Firefox or Metafilter decides to empty the closing em tag (leaving two carats) and append a set of empty carats and a closing em tag to my whole post. Trying to clean it up leads to all kinds of problems - the cursor jumps around and deletes things on its own. Has anyone else experienced this? Is it Android, Firefox, Metafilter, or some combination of all three? Any help would be appreciated.
posted by Benny Andajetz to Bugs at 8:31 AM (41 comments total)

Man, that sounds like a pain. For what it's worth, the only monkeying with tags that mefi does at comment-processing time is nuking blacklisted tags entirely (rather than emptying them out) and trying to create matching close tags for dangling open tags, so the appending of </> makes sense as a reaction to something fucking up the tags earlier in the process but said up-fucking isn't something the site even has a mechanism to do as far as I know.

We haven't heard other reports of this via the contact form that I can recall, so (lucky for you?) it may be a pretty specifically constrained issue with that hardware/software combo.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:37 AM on December 9, 2013


Have you tried other browsers? You might test out the default browser and see if you can narrow it down to a Firefox problem. Chrome, Opera, and Dolphin are other options to try.
posted by pb (staff) at 8:43 AM on December 9, 2013


on android i find the text box on metafilter to be one of the very worst to wrangle with - but i think that's on the way the phone zooms and deals with text boxes - also, my spellcheck/word suggestion function on swype works the least on metafilter - but again, i think it's probably a phone thing and not a metafilter thing.

i do wonder if some of the zoom issues could be alleviated if the text box was less wide on the mobile version, but that might not even be the problem.
posted by nadawi at 8:44 AM on December 9, 2013 [4 favorites]


oh, and i use the default browser. i don't get any of the emptying tag problems, but i do get a lot of cursor jump - but, again, i think that's an android wrangling text box issue. lately i've been composing my comments on mobile in notepad like programs and just copy/paste the whole thing into metafilter.
posted by nadawi at 8:47 AM on December 9, 2013


Reading metafilter on my Kindle fire is replete with similar headaches --- I just assumed it was a Kindle problem, because I thought they did their own adaptation of Android for it. But yeah, I get the jumpy cursor, accidentally deleting things stuff too. On the other hand, the kindle touchscreen seems somewhat less responsive in general no matter the app.
posted by Diablevert at 8:51 AM on December 9, 2013


Hi, I'm a Firefox developer and I used to work on the Firefox for Android team. I'll see if I can reproduce this today and file a bug, or if you'd like to you can file a report yourself with details of the problem.
posted by mbrubeck at 8:59 AM on December 9, 2013 [5 favorites]


on android i find the text box on metafilter to be one of the very worst to wrangle with...

nadawi, if you can send me (either here or via mefi mail) some sites with text boxes that work better with your setup than MetaFilter I can take a look and see if there are differences. That might give me some more info to go on for improving things.
posted by pb (staff) at 9:08 AM on December 9, 2013


Lately, in the process of posting, Android or Firefox or Metafilter decides to empty the closing em tag (leaving two carats) and append a set of empty carats and a closing em tag to my whole post.

I couldn't reproduce this on either of my Android devices (at least not on preview; this comment is also a test). So if you could either file a bug or MeMail me with more details, that'd be great. Thanks!
posted by mbrubeck at 9:23 AM on December 9, 2013


IIRC, the posting/preview code for each sub-site is slightly different (right, pb?), so knowing if this happened on the blue/green/gray comment field may make a difference for troubleshooting?
posted by misterbrandt at 9:33 AM on December 9, 2013


There are some slight differences with thread pages and the full HTML preview, but the sites all share common code that displays the comment form.
posted by pb (staff) at 9:35 AM on December 9, 2013


OK, I just posted with Chrome with no problems. That leads me to believe the issue is with Firefox. And it's something new with Firefox, as it didn't happen with earlier versions. It's too bad, because Firefox is the only one that will let me use the search engines I want to.
posted by Benny Andajetz at 9:39 AM on December 9, 2013


I think that I had this problem on the default Android browser on my Motorola Droid 4 and the Silk browser on my Kindle Fire, and that I solved it by using Chrome instead on my phone and not looking at MetaFilter from my Kindle anymore. It's still infuriatingly difficult to try and copy-and-paste or quote people on my phone, to the point that very rarely even bother to try actually, but that's the nature of mobile browsing. Nothing can be done on the server end to make it better.
posted by ob1quixote at 9:40 AM on December 9, 2013


I have different, mostly user-error problems quoting and posting from my iPhone but now I just compose my comments in Notes first. It's saved a lot of frustration and find it is worth the extra back-and-forth. It me ay be worth trying.
posted by Room 641-A at 9:45 AM on December 9, 2013


Man, that sounds like a pain.

I just did this on my andoid phone from firefox. commenting this way sucks as a rule so I only rarely do it
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 10:29 AM on December 9, 2013


So, no, I don't see that on my Galaxy SIII and Firefox. The text box is too wide and very unwieldly on the phone.

Are you using the text box buttons to add the carats and tags ? Or using the keyboard ? I use the keyboard because the buttons didn't work right the last time I tried and I just never did it again.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 10:32 AM on December 9, 2013


Repro'ing on FF25 on a Nexus 4 and a Nexus 10 with Android 4.3 and 4.4. Editing is a nightmare because the cursor position is almost entirely meaningless. The cursor can lag over a second when trying to drag. Backspace will often delete a word or a part of a word from another position in text, will sometimes duplicate a word from cursor position or transpose it into another position in text, will sometimes delete starting several characters behind the cursor. Typing tags by hand is not at all reliable, because the angle brackets also seem to interfere with where text gets inserted. Composing a comment of 3-4 sentences takes 10 minutes on a good day.
posted by Nomyte at 10:47 AM on December 9, 2013 [1 favorite]


pb - i poked around - some of the things i'm talking about i realized are purpose built apps, so of course they work better for commenting and the others are closed communities so don't really help you. i'll keep an eye out and shoot you a memail if i get something more useful.
posted by nadawi at 11:38 AM on December 9, 2013


"Reading metafilter on my Kindle fire is replete with similar headaches --- I just assumed it was a Kindle problem, because I thought they did their own adaptation of Android for it. But yeah, I get the jumpy cursor, accidentally deleting things stuff too. On the other hand, the kindle touchscreen seems somewhat less responsive in general no matter the app."

If you can live without the Amazon Prime Instant Video, I recommend just converting your Fire into a true Android tablet. For your rom, I suggest CyanogenMod. I found my Fire 8.9 HD to be very unsatisfying after I bought it last year and fairly quickly just stopped using it. A few months ago I rooted it and installed CyanogenMod and now I am much, much happier with it and I use it almost daily.

And, yeah, I found that a lot of onscreen keyboard typing was unusable on the stock Fire, with a bunch of weird behavior like what's reported above, and not just in the browser text entry.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 12:04 PM on December 9, 2013


The text box is too wide and very unwieldly on the phone.

Yeah, I found that the textarea was too wide on certain Android phones. I just made a change to address this. So the comment textarea should fit within the page now. If it doesn't, let me know which browser you're using and which version of Android you're running and I'll take a look.
posted by pb (staff) at 2:26 PM on December 9, 2013 [4 favorites]


The comment box is still far wider than the display on my phone.

Firefox 25.0.1 and Android 4.1.2.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 3:51 PM on December 9, 2013


Thanks, paleyellowwithorange. I'll get an emulator going with Firefox 25 on Android 4.1.2. You might try refreshing the page a few times to be sure you have the latest version.
posted by pb (staff) at 4:33 PM on December 9, 2013 [1 favorite]


Hey, that's much better! Thanks pb!
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 5:29 PM on December 9, 2013 [1 favorite]


Sure, found the Firefox on Android issue. The Preview button is breaking to the next line in Firefox/Android only for me—tracking that down is on my to do list. But it's at least usable like this.
posted by pb (staff) at 5:32 PM on December 9, 2013


Oh man, I'm so glad I'm not crazy. I'm glad to hear the textbox width is getting tweaked, but I can also confirm anecdotally that the cursor goes crazygonuts a lot of the time when you try to do something non-linear while writing a comment.

Using the B/I/link buttons is a frequent cause, but I feel like I often see it when trying to relocate the cursor while an autocompletion is still "active" (i.e. underlined, indicating that I can possibly undo the autocorrection by backspacing or maybe choose an alternative completion). An error case for me often looks like:
  1. Type type type, usually involving some autocompletion even if it's just confirming the autocompletion that was suggested.
  2. Notice something I want to correct, tap immediately after it to move the cursor there. (possibly unrelated observation: tapping on the text box darkens the entire thing as if it was being activated in some way, rather than just moving the cursor.)
  3. Hit backspace to try to make the correction.
  4. Result: something that may or may not be what I tapped on is deleted. The text cursor ends up in a location that may or may not be where I tapped. Continuing to hit backspace will delete more characters or words near the location of the first (incorrect) deletion, even though the cursor is no longer there.
I don't have exact steps to reproduce it reliably, but the above has been my experience. Feel encouraged to memail me if you think I can help, I'm a web developer and use FF for Android on three different types of Nexi, so I'm happy to chip in with any info I can provide.
posted by Riki tiki at 5:50 PM on December 9, 2013 [1 favorite]


Comment box still too wide on Chrome for Android, version 31.0.1650.59

Also, it won't display italics for sans-serif fonts. Pb, can you go over to Google headquarters and kick them in the butt until they fix that?
posted by Scientist at 8:37 PM on December 9, 2013


Oh, and that's with a Galaxy Note 2, Android version 4.1.2.
posted by Scientist at 8:38 PM on December 9, 2013


The narrower comment box is great, thanks pb.
posted by helicomatic at 8:48 PM on December 9, 2013


Sorry, Scientist, I can't duplicate this one. I have Chromium running on an Android emulator set to Galaxy Note 2 specs running 4.1.2 and it's checking out ok. (For some reason the powers that be don't want you to run the full Chrome browser in an emulator.)

I also have Chrome running on a real live physical Galaxy Nexus running version 4.2.2 and that's checking out ok for me too. I'm in the mobile view and landscape and portrait modes both check out fine.

You might try clearing out your Chrome cache (Settings, Privacy, Clear Browsing Data [bottom], Clear) just to make sure you're not seeing the previous version of the site. And if that doesn't help you might try another browser just to narrow it down to a Chrome issue.
posted by pb (staff) at 9:43 PM on December 9, 2013


Yay smaller comment box!

I can't type worth crap on my phone, but now I can see the crap I'm typing. :)
posted by littlesq at 11:32 PM on December 9, 2013 [1 favorite]


Oh, and I'm on a Galaxy S3 w/ Android 4.1.2 so it works beautifuly now.
posted by littlesq at 11:35 PM on December 9, 2013


I was wondering why the comment boxes were awesome on my phone all of a sudden, thanks!
posted by jason_steakums at 4:10 PM on December 10, 2013 [1 favorite]


I've noticed much the same thing as Riki tiki, with the exception of the text box darkening. I'm using Chrome and Swiftkey on a Nexus 4, and it does seem strongly correlated with autocorrect/autocomplete. I don't post much from my phone, (or at all, for that matter), so I haven't tried too hard to track it down further.
posted by yuwtze at 7:56 PM on December 10, 2013


For those of you on Firefox for Android, the Three Finger Swipe add-on with the swipe up/down gestures set to jump to the end and beginning of pages makes megathreads much more bearable on a phone.
posted by jason_steakums at 8:09 PM on December 10, 2013


Firefox has updated to 26.0 since I posted. I just posted a comment on the blue and the tag mess didn't happen, so maybe the glitch is fixed? Thanks to everyone who has been working on/looking into this. As usual, Metafilter rocks!
posted by Benny Andajetz at 10:08 AM on December 11, 2013 [1 favorite]


Yeah, I'm still getting the too-big box as well, even after clearing the cache. Chrome version 31.0.1650.59 on Android 4.1.2; DROID4 Build/9.8.2O-72_VZW-18. For me the width is 58 'M's but the screen only shows 48. The height of 16 lines means that I have to scroll down to see the buttons.
posted by ob1quixote at 8:22 PM on December 11, 2013


Thanks for the report, ob1quixote. If someone experiencing the too-wide textarea in Chrome could visit this page and send me the results (either here or via MeFi Mail) that might give me some more info to go on.

Also, it'd help to know if this happens in other browsers on 4.1.2 as well. Like I mentioned, I can't duplicate this in the emulator so I'm a bit stuck on this end.
posted by pb (staff) at 8:49 PM on December 11, 2013


Here are the results with the keyboard open (so phone in landscape mode):

Date and Time: 12/11/2013 22:38:58
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.1.2; DROID4 Build/9.8.2O-72_VZW-18) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/31.0.1650.59 Mobile Safari/537.36
Screen Width: 640
Mobile View? 1
Mobile Client: Android+

With the keyboard closed (phone held portrait) the width is 362. Going to try the default browser in a second.
posted by ob1quixote at 10:44 PM on December 11, 2013


Date and Time: 12/11/2013 22:46:30
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.1.2; en-us; DROID4 Build/9.8.2O-72_VZW-18) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/534.30
Screen Width: 640
Mobile View? 1
Mobile Client: Android+

The default browser works somewhat better, though it suffers from editing glitches like backspace erasing the space before the previous word.The edit box at least fits on the screen, including the buttons. Reported screen sizes are the same. Cut and paste doesn't work all that well. For example, it pasted the clipboard above this paragraph instead of below.
posted by ob1quixote at 10:53 PM on December 11, 2013


Thanks, ob1quixote. I appreciate it. That lets me know we're at least identifying everything correctly. Unfortunately it doesn't help in the why department. Maybe a Chrome-specific setting somewhere? I don't know. Still stumped, but at least we've narrowed the problem down to Chrome on 4.1.2 only. (So far.)
posted by pb (staff) at 10:57 PM on December 11, 2013


Sure thing, pb. Glad too.

For what it's worth, I'm perfectly happy with it the way it is. There's not much you can do to make posting from a phone or other mobile device as effortless as posting from something with a mouse and keyboard. It's just the price one has to pay to post while they're out in the world or otherwise away from their computer.
posted by ob1quixote at 11:01 PM on December 11, 2013


Date and Time: 12/11/2013 23:14:27
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3 1 2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/7D11
Screen Width:
Mobile View? 1
Mobile Client: iPhone

So I thought of one more thing that would tie the problem down to the above user agents or perhaps reported screen widths. I fired up Orbot and told it to lie and say it's an iPhone. (The default Orbot user agent doesn't admit to being a mobile device, so I saw the regular desktop view.) I see the new, narrower text area though it's a little too tall maybe. The arrow keys and backspace work properly. It still didn't paste the clipboard in the right place though. If I set the UA to Android, I get the same problems as using Chrome.
posted by ob1quixote at 11:21 PM on December 11, 2013


« Older Claim your keyboard here folks.   |   Spreading rumors is bad news Newer »

You are not logged in, either login or create an account to post comments