Firefox 3 (on OS X) — Special Characters Bug
During my recent contact with an English company, I’ve had to use the pound sign (£) a lot, which has uncovered a bug in Firefox 3 — at least I think it is… Using the danish keyboard layout the pound sign has to be made by pressing alt-4, but doing so in Firefox 3 will just result in switching to tab no. 4 if a such exists. If not, the shortcut will merely do nothing. Either way, no pound sign for me.
Effectively this means that all combinations from alt-1 – alt-9 are useless, which means that the following characters can’t be written in Firefox 3 on OS X with a danish keyboard layout: ¡, “, §, £, ∞, ™, ¶, [ and ]. I find it especially troublesome that the hard brackets doesn’t work, since they’re extensibly used in BBTags, as replacements for < and > when writing HTML examples in a place that doesn’t handle < and > well, it’s used as scope delimiter in Functional Grammar notation and in a ton of other places.
I’ve scoured the web for a solution (as well as about:config) but to no avail.
September 2nd, 2008 at 7:37 pm
i toggel tabs witk command- not alt. £ works fine here.
What doesn’t work, which almost make the browser unusable for me, is the new bookmark system. I mean the browser can display web pages, but if i can’t bookmark, i’m kind lost. Right now my desktop is full of *.webloc files. It’s a mess. I was really looking forward to see how the tags-system would work for organizing bookmarks. It might be due to the import of my old bookmarks, witch wasn’t exactly a smooth operation. Don’t know what to do about it.
September 3rd, 2008 at 1:33 am
Weird! I can change between tabs with both Cmd-number and Alt-number… Wonder why our Firefoxen behave differently…
Frankly, I love the new bookmark system. It’s so much easier just clicking the star in the URL-bar than going through the whole mess with selecting name and location and stuff.
So what happens if you press the star to bookmark?
September 4th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Ohh… it’s to hard to explain in a few sentences. It kind of just doesn’t bookmark. Might be due to the tags. At one point i could bookmark, but then i started tagging and it went bonkers. I might try to reinstall, see if that helps. But i fear it’s my bookmark file that’s got corrupted in some way. As i said, the automatically import of my bookmarks from FF2 to FF3 wasn’t exactly a smooth operation. Manually importing my bookmarks is something i wanna do as much as anal-piss my self in the face. So…
I have to say i’d like it, meaning the system and the work flow, if only it worked (for me). I tried to search the bug tracker, but with out luck. Properly my search phrase wasn’t the right one.
September 7th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
Actually, it’s a bit weird, because I didn’t even have to import my bookmarks from Ff2 to Ff3. I just upgraded and they were all there.
September 7th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
When i upgraded there were some bookmarks but the the latest. They were like a week or two old. I was going almost flikflak i randers fjord til at discovered that it wasn’t an “rm -rf” like situation. The resent set of bookmarks were there.
Then i tried to import them “manually”, but with out much luck wrt. smoothness.
September 7th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
This should maybe be in the software cat.?
September 7th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
You’re right — I’ve assigned it some categories.
September 8th, 2008 at 9:01 am
Do you have a danish language OS X install? I have english. Could it be that?
September 8th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
I can switch between them as I like, but I use English with Danish keyboard layout. I assume you use the same.
November 14th, 2008 at 3:53 am
Hmm, turned out it was an add-on causing the trouble. Can’t remember which, but it was either Speed Dial or Foxmarks (I think Speed Dial)… I can finally write [ and ] again. \(^.^)/