[martinbooth]

In firefox it skips one letter at a time and maybe that is the intended behaviour, but it doesn't seem consistent with what I'd expect from a WYSIWYG editor.

I'd expect there to be 2 positions between the "e" and the "t" that the cursor would stop at so I can either insert text with the formatting of "one" or "two"

[333c]

There is a position at the start of "two" in Firefox, but you have to approach it from the right. That feels sane to me.

[deathanatos]

The "approach from the direction you want to take styling from" breaks down when you cannot approach from the other direction, or if there are >2 possible insertion points in the middle of a piece of text. I'm going to use Markdown to show the markup in HN, but pretend like it's rich HTML:

  A string that ends in *bold!*
                             // 
                            AB

Only position A is possible in Firefox's "approach from" algorithm; there is no way to tack on non-bold text to the end, short adding it and then re-/unformatting it.

You can then pretty quickly see what goes wrong here:

  A string that have *_italic bold_ and bold!*
                    ///
                   ABC

In Firefox, only positions A and C are possible; there is no way to start editing at B.

I think you could turn any of these into interesting box forms like one of the links in this thread that has two colored boxes, and you could have text somewhere (like between A & B in the second example here) and delete that text, and suddenly not be able to get a cursor back there, short of laying some text down and reformatting it.

Markdown, and other markup/syntax based inputs, make this trivially obvious, to a large degree. (Some ambiguities in the syntax can cause issues, but those seem to be rarer than issues w/ Slacks WYSIWYG editor.)

[aitchnyu]

Don't Fuck with Paste, extension that disables anti-paste event handlers some banks use, triggers this when pasting into rich editors. Even Facebook and old Slack editor, IIRC.

[epse]

Yup, in order to be able to paste into any of those inputs you need to have clipboard events on