can't type in firefox

i've been using firefox for a while now, since firefox 2.x if i remember correctly, and i've been very happy with it. in fact, it has been my browser of choice for years be it for linux, windows, or mac. i even had portable firefox ready in one of my thumb drives just in case i'm on some machine without firefox installed. sadly, i can't say the same for version 3.5. so much so that google chrome is now starting to spend more time on my dock.

being a user of bleeding edge open source software for sometime now, i'm used to playing around with buggy apps. when something goes awry i know that solving it usually just involves at least one of 3 r's: restart, reboot (usually with windows), or reinstall. but for software like firefox which is now on 3.5, this shouldn't have to be the case. unlike beta or alpha software of which i am more forgiving, i expect much more from a product of this level of maturity. were not talking 1.0 here, it's version freakin' 3.5 already!

anyways, enough of my firefox rant let me get to the actual point of this post!

since 3.5 (at least that's when i started noticing it) my firefox, after running smoothly (more or less) for some hours would occasionally stop working. to be more specific, it would just suddenly stop receiving input from my keyboard. i could close tabs just fine, but i couldn't type on any text field! not on any text field in the current page i'm on nor the url or search fields of the actual browser. in the past, i would just shutdown firefox (kill/force quit mostly since it more often than not stops responding as well), but today i just got fed up and started looking for a solution. also, i didn't want to kill firefox because there were some tabs that i haven't bookmarked yet.

determined not to let this get the better of me, i turned to our friend google for a solution to my problem. with google chrome and a bit of google-fu, i got these results using the following keywords: firefox can't type. the first page of the search results alone told me that i was not alone. there were actually 24,200,00 results and although this is not necessarily an indicator of how prevalent the problem is, the results on the first page sure are. with results such as these, i was confident that the solution was just a click or two away.

the first result was actually all i needed. a very helpful post from pengunassasin said:

i wasn't actually running greasemonkey, but this post was a very good hint at the problem: javascript.

i'm not sure if it's the web programmer's fault for using window.stop() or the firefox (or firefox add on) developers fault for mishandling the interpretation of the code but i think both of them are at fault. the web programmer for not knowing better, and the firefox developers for not handling it properly. i mean, firefox developers, why would you allow an arbitrary piece of javascript code to stop the whole browser from receiving input? even if you say that window.stop() shouldn't really be used, it's there so you should be prepared to handle it!

dang, went into another rant there.

so what is the solution, very simple actually, just disable and then re-enable javascript in preferences. easy.

for those not familiar with how to do that here's a screen cap:

hope this post helps someone out there.

oh and one more thing... woohoo! another blog post after almost a year! well at least, it wasn't 2 years like the last time =)