From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050416 Fedora/1.0.3-1.3.1 Firefox/1.0.3 Description of problem: Go to a website that has a Java applet that has text boxes. Try to enter some text. It's not working, no matter what i type in, nothing shows up. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): firefox-1.0.3-1.3.1 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. see above 2. 3. Additional info: Java(TM) Plug-in 1.4.2_08-b03 The whole thing started out recently. Text entries in Java applets used to work until a few weeks ago. Trying out Java 1.5 has no point since many sites are not yet compatible with it.
Discussion on fedora-list, subject "Firefox and Java bug": https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2005-April/thread.html#05532
And here's an example of non-working applet: http://www.terrafly.com/ Pretty damn cool website, such a pity it's hit by this bug. I've other examples, totally unrelated sites, but they're work-related so i can't post URLs. :-)
Per suggestion by Calvin Austin on fedora-list, i thought that perhaps Firefox does not let the applet get the focus. However, that's not true. There's a site (sorry, can't post URL) where the applet comes up with one of the text fields having two weird characters - they look like little dotted squares. I can delete those characters using Backspace, so the applet does get the focus. It's just that i can't type in my own text. I believe, but i may be wrong, that that text field that i mentioned used to come up with a five-digit user ID pre-filled in. Instead, now there are just those characters.
Might be related to bug #156276 (try changing to LANG env var as suggested there and reporting on the results)
answer to comment #4 Yes, it did fix it. While launching firefox, i got these messages: $ firefox perl: warning: Setting locale failed. perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings: LANGUAGE = (unset), LC_ALL = (unset), LANG = "UTF-8" are supported and installed on your system. perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
I agree that this is the same bug as 156276. As indicated in comment #5, LANG=C fixed it for us too. Until there is a patch, we are setting LANG=UTF-8 just before invoking java, but not changing it from LANG=en_US.UTF-8 for the entire system.
Alright, this is not just about Java applets running in Firefox, it's about any Java application. I tested Visual Route for Linux as a standalone Java app, and i get the unreadable characters unless i do a "export LANG=C" before launching VR. http://download.visualware.com/networkmonitoring/index.html
We cannot set LANG=C by default in order to workaround a java bug.
Answer to comment #8 Warren, i did not imply that you should set LANG=C. That is just a workaround that seems to fix the problem until a proper solution is found. And i don't believe it's a Java bug either. The system was working properly until some Fedora update, after which many Java applets and applications stopped functioning properly.
comment #6 My bug https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=156276
Fedora Core 3 is now maintained by the Fedora Legacy project for security updates only. If this problem is a security issue, please reopen and reassign to the Fedora Legacy product. If it is not a security issue and hasn't been resolved in the current FC5 updates or in the FC6 test release, reopen and change the version to match. Thank you!
I don't have access to the particular Java Web application where I noticed the issue for the first time (it was a fairly big and complex application) and nowadays I'm not using any other Web apps at that level of complexity. Cannot do tests anymore for this bug.