Making text bold then typing crashes Chrome

[mikenolan]

Getting a pretty obscure bug with TinyMCE in certain situations. Turning on bold text either with the toolbar button or Ctrl-B then starting to type, Chrome 38 will crash with the first keystroke.

It's possibly a Chrome issue - it's only come to light with Chrome 38 released last week and isn't (currently) happening with Chrome Canary 40, however it's only happening in WordPress, not with straight TinyMCE and most notably, only when using the Twenty Twelve theme (or children of it).

Here's the bug in action:

​https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-rPZ6460XuzOHFseHNaYmNpa00/view?usp=sharing

I'm almost certain it has something to do with the U+FEFF (ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE / BYTE ORDER MARK) character that gets inserted when bold text is turned on as they cause crashes in the frontend of WordPress sites as well.

Just tried latest stable version of Opera and it crashes that too.

[iseulde]

I can't reproduce in Chrome 38.0.2125.101 with Twenty Twelve activated.

[mikenolan]

A few more details about the environment(s) where I'm seeing this error.

Windows 7 64 bit PC running

• Chrome 38.0.2125.104 (32 bit version)
• Opera 25.0.1614.50 (32 bit)

Android 4.4.4

• Chrome for Android 38.0.2125.102

These were tested using a Twenty Twelve site running on WordPress.com to eliminate our server environment.

I'm pretty sure this is a similar issue to #30001.

[azaozz]

Testing in Chrome 38.0.2125.104 m on Win7, not able to reproduce it either. TinyMCE pads empty inline nodes with U+FEFF so the caret can be placed there (bugfix for contentEditable). That's not new, has been used for years.

This bug is most likely triggered by the styles added by Twenty Twelve. If you can isolate which one triggers it, we can find a workaround.

[iseulde]

Hi @mikenolan,

Are you still experiencing this issue with Chrome 39?

[iseulde]

No feedback in 3 months and no similar reports.