Bug 244976 – Textarea selection does not return the caret position on focus event

• Status: NEW
• Component: Forms

[Ahmad Saleem]

Hi Team,

Another dumpster dive in Chromium Monorail to find any test case broken in Safari / Webkit and I came across following:

Test Case - https://jsfiddle.net/2s64xjve/

----

<textarea id="text"></textarea>
<button onclick="document.getElementById('text').focus();">Focus</button>
<script>
  var textarea = document.getElementById('text');
  textarea.addEventListener('focus', function (e) {
    console.log(textarea.selectionStart);
  });
</script>


----

Chrome Bug Link - https://crbug.com/526516

*** STEPS TO REPRODUCE ***

1) Go to JSFiddle
2) Type something in the field
3) Place your cursor in the middle or somewhere in the text and click on "Focus"

<<< ACTUAL RESULT >>>

Returns 0

<<< EXPECTED RESULT >>>

Show the caret position or character where our IBEAM cursor is.

^^^ OTHER BROWSERS ^^^

Chrome Canary 107 - shows position of IBEAM
Firefox Nightly 106 - shows position of IBEAM
Safari Technology Preview 152 - shows "Actual Result"

_____

Matching other browsers would be great and why not another chance to make Webkit better.

Thanks!

[Ryosuke Niwa]

Hm... Chrome also seems to fail this test. Only Firefox shows the right offset when clicking inside the textarea.

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

In my testing, Chrome passes?

I think that there are two aspects here:

1. Why are we even removing the focus from textarea when clicking on the button? Seems related to bug 22261.

2. When the focus returns, the selection is restored too late. Compare to this test case:

  textarea.addEventListener('focus', function (e) {
    console.log(textarea.selectionStart); // 0
    setTimeout(()=>{console.log(textarea.selectionStart)}, 0); // correct offset
  });

[Radar WebKit Bug Importer]

<rdar://problem/100025436>