I'm happy to see this write up. I have the same experience with this behavior and others, including the keyboard being (a) called when it shouldn't be and (b) vice-versa.
While writing up this article, I only just noticed that the Typescript playground [1] (that I referred to in the post) straight up does not work with Gboard in Firefox, because the keyboard never shows up.
A few years back I tried getting a related Gboard bug fixed and it was really frustrating getting the report to the right people. In the end, I did not manage it and what happened was after a long time the bug was fixed, probably due to some internal testing rather than the Gboard devs seeing my report :(
"Android 11 - Gboard not triggering Enter keypress event on <textarea> in Chrome when there are suggested words in the Gboard suggestion strip"
The first frustration was getting push back from every place I tried reporting it - Android bug tracker, Chromium bug tracker,... and of course there is no public Gboard bug tracker, the only option is the "Send feedback" option in modern Android OS on Google devices that I'm sure gets lost somewhere.
While I do understand each of the mentioned bug trackers has its rules, I had to give it a try considering there is no other way to actually write a technical bug report and get any Google developer to notice it :(
My suggestion is that each Google product/app should have a public bug tracker of some type. A place where power users and developers can reach the corresponding Google teams more easily.
I sometimes get this feeling from open source projects too. They require you to be very specific and provide lots of info, understandably, but it zaps energy of the reporter. And then at the end turns out all was for naught, except that you learn you should have raised the issue in another repo or bugtracker. And worst is, when projects have the audacity to tell you to sign up to yet another forum service to report it to them. Nope. No energy left for that shit, maybe someone else will raise the issue then.
It's actually not a Gboard bug, but rather a side effect caused by a design choice of Gboard that Gboard tries to handle text editing in a normal text box by itself whenever possible. For example Gboard handles the delete key event by itself and delete the letter before the cursor directly instead of sending the delete key event to the app and rely on the app to delete the letter.
Gboard does it in this way for many reasons, but the side effect is that the app should not use a normal text box and expect to receive all key events. It's different than using a physical keyboard on a desktop/laptop computer. That said, do not expect a virtual keyboard to behave in the same way as a physical keyboard.
The workaround mentioned in the article makes sense.
Another possible solution for apps that want to receive raw key events is to use a password input box instead of a normal text box.
> It's actually not a Gboard bug, but rather a side effect caused by a design choice of Gboard…
It’s definitely a bug, because the design choice they made breaks invariants and causes buggy behaviour in otherwise functioning code.
Otherwise it would be like saying “segfaulting randomly is actually not a bug, but rather a side effect caused by a design choice we made to have sloppy code and terrible memory management”.
Great writeup, always interesting to see people digging into issues like that in such detail. I work at Google and shared the article with the Gboard team. Thanks!
I haven't had to debug anything like this for a bit, although it's making me want to test some code I have that relies on keycodes in events. Which is hard enough to deal with at the input level across browsers without having to worry about it across freakin keyboards.
Imagine if every bug report included such detailed steps to replicate, including a custom website to display those steps! An "average" bug report is usually on the other extreme of things :-/
Anyway, this may well be the finest bug report the team behind the Google keyboard has ever received, and I hope, as a reward, they actually fix the issue :-).
I have little confidence that a bug report I make to a large company is read by anyone. Particularly when it's in a generic feedback form. That applies to feedback for Google products.
I suspect this post on HN is more likely to make its way back to a Gboard Developer than submitting feedback in the app.
My guess is that the difference in Keycodes, 229 and 2, could be due to gboard trying to delete the entire autocompleted word, instead of deleting one character at a time. But I could be wrong.
Interesting bug with Gboard! It seems like the backspace key doesn’t work right on some websites because Gboard sends the wrong signal when autocomplete is on
Great job writing up the prognosis. I've experienced a few subtly nuanced Gboard and text input bugs on Android with quite unintuitive and frustrating symptoms (eg. keyboard not coming up when it should, copy/paste context menus not coming up after selecting a lot of text, etc). It's kind of pathetic when a platform can't even get text and the keyboard right.
[+] [-] sans_souse|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] yen223|1 year ago|reply
I do not know why.
[1] https://www.typescriptlang.org/play/
[+] [-] markostamcar|1 year ago|reply
"Android 11 - Gboard not triggering Enter keypress event on <textarea> in Chrome when there are suggested words in the Gboard suggestion strip"
https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40738692
The first frustration was getting push back from every place I tried reporting it - Android bug tracker, Chromium bug tracker,... and of course there is no public Gboard bug tracker, the only option is the "Send feedback" option in modern Android OS on Google devices that I'm sure gets lost somewhere. While I do understand each of the mentioned bug trackers has its rules, I had to give it a try considering there is no other way to actually write a technical bug report and get any Google developer to notice it :(
My suggestion is that each Google product/app should have a public bug tracker of some type. A place where power users and developers can reach the corresponding Google teams more easily.
[+] [-] zelphirkalt|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] suzhe|1 year ago|reply
Gboard does it in this way for many reasons, but the side effect is that the app should not use a normal text box and expect to receive all key events. It's different than using a physical keyboard on a desktop/laptop computer. That said, do not expect a virtual keyboard to behave in the same way as a physical keyboard.
The workaround mentioned in the article makes sense. Another possible solution for apps that want to receive raw key events is to use a password input box instead of a normal text box.
[+] [-] orf|1 year ago|reply
It’s definitely a bug, because the design choice they made breaks invariants and causes buggy behaviour in otherwise functioning code.
Otherwise it would be like saying “segfaulting randomly is actually not a bug, but rather a side effect caused by a design choice we made to have sloppy code and terrible memory management”.
[+] [-] Wookai|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] noduerme|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] grahamm|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] qingcharles|1 year ago|reply
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/18l1x5o/double_emo...
[+] [-] emmanueloga_|1 year ago|reply
Anyway, this may well be the finest bug report the team behind the Google keyboard has ever received, and I hope, as a reward, they actually fix the issue :-).
Good job!
[+] [-] YPPH|1 year ago|reply
I suspect this post on HN is more likely to make its way back to a Gboard Developer than submitting feedback in the app.
[+] [-] surfingdino|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] gcbill|1 year ago|reply
Seems like a pretty simple bug to address
[+] [-] Mejdi_ch|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rkagerer|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] whereistimbo|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] vsskanth|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] kaonwarb|1 year ago|reply