When creating an answer, accidental Tab can ruin the session

Question

Using IE8.

On any screen, where there's an edit field, but no other text fields, there's a problem.

If you accidentally press Tab while typing your answer, the focus will jump to the Post Your Answer button, and:

• There'll be a JS error in wmd.js: Cannot set text property. Unexpected method call or property access (back-translated to English, wording might be different)
• Two bullets will be prepended to the "Post Your Answer" text. Repeating this action will cause more bullets to appear, two at a time. EDIT: Oh, it's four at a time here at Meta! Or does it depend on previous attempts?

• Shortly after that, the screen will become unusable. It will appear hang, it won't redraw itself, it won't accept controls, and if you switch to another tab and then switch back, you'll see the image of the previos tab in place of the hang one.

This will not happen if there's another text field on the editing screen, apart from the main box. That is, no problems on Edit screen (will jump to Describe Your Edits box), and no problems on New Question screen (will jump to Tags box).

Answer 1

This was happening because the code that checks what text is selected in the input box wasn't taking into account that the box might not be focused at the moment of the check.

A similar thing could happen if you type something, then un-focus the box, and then click the "undo" button.

Both of these are fixed in the next build. Thanks for a good bug report!