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contenteditable
Raised as a usability problem by 11 people on Hacker News over 13 years (2013–2025), in 10 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Contenteditable behaves inconsistently between browsersUnreviewed
20132026- Browser contentEditable editing is broken differently in each browser, producing poor output2015-06-14
- Browser contenteditable fights developers and users, with default shortcuts and selection APIs misbehaving2014-12-08
- Contenteditable behaves inconsistently between browsers and fails in many ways2013-10-21
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 11 complaints
- Painful to use, inconsistent across browsers, and buggy in Firefox2025-03-07
- Rendered view dictates how input works, causing cross-browser input quirks2023-07-05
- Cursor placement mid-text and with selections is very hard to get right in contentEditable2021-07-24
- No decent browser API for building WYSIWYG editors, forcing developers to rely on heavy third-party libraries2021-04-23
- Browsers mangle whitespace and format HTML differently, making editing painful2018-04-13
- Browsers handle bold, paste and selection inconsistently, making rich text editing painful to build2016-04-30
- Non-intuitive default behaviour the commenter constantly struggles with2016-04-13
- Accidental deletion breaks bindings; text stays inside the bound area unexpectedly2016-04-13
- Browser contentEditable editing is broken differently in each browser, producing poor output2015-06-14
- Browser contenteditable fights developers and users, with default shortcuts and selection APIs misbehaving2014-12-08
- Contenteditable behaves inconsistently between browsers and fails in many ways2013-10-21