Learning the World

As I alluded to yesterday, Firefox 3 on the Mac won’t accepted formatted text from other applications (most notably word). While this does mean that users don’t have to deal with the Word<->Firefox 3  extraneous code problem, also means that every document that gets cut and pasted into Firefox 3 is going to come in without any sort of formatting. This is a pain for folks who were used to this functionality in Firefox 2, and I expect that we’ll see more and more complaints about this as Firefox 3 achieves deeper penetration on campus.

There’s a report on this bug in Bugzilla; please vote for it. 

• Clipboard and drag-and-drop don’t interoperate with formatted text (e.g. HTML) on OS X

There’s also a good conversation about the issue, including possible workarounds, at MacRumors.com:

• Copy and Paste removes formatting – why?

Note that Safari on the Mac does not have this problem, but I’ve found Safari support in TinyMCE and CKEditor flaky at best (e.g. when cutting and pasting from Word into Safari using TinyMCE 2.x in Drupal, the resulting text will have random spaces removed from between words).

Update 11/7/2008

The patch that fixes this problem has been committed, so hopefully we’ll see this in production soon!