Gmail cursor issue

January 7, 2008 5:16 PM

Gmail is behaving really annoyingly for me lately: when I type an email, the cursor suddenly jumps into the text of the email I am answering and/or into something I have previously typed, thereby making it wrong. So, in this question, it might suddenly jump from here to the paragraph above or below rather than going sequentially. I am using firefox. It only does this on the "new version" but it won't stay set on "older version" when I navigate away. Also, it sometimes sends suddenly when I'm working on an email. Google's Help and Newsgroup didn't help. Any thoughts? Thanks in advance!
posted by Maias to computers & internet (12 comments total)

What kind of computer?

Has this been happening since they changed to the new UI? Or did it start more recently? If more recently, did anything else change on your computer?
posted by wemayfreeze at 5:22 PM on January 7, 2008

Gmail has a lot of hotkeys that can do what you're describing. Tab-Enter, for instance, will send a message, and of course Tab alone will move the focus to the next field. Could you (or your keyboard) be sending these inadvertently?
posted by futility closet at 5:28 PM on January 7, 2008

You can enable/disable keyboard shortcuts under Settings.
posted by futility closet at 5:33 PM on January 7, 2008

Do you have a laptop with a trackpad by any chance? If that's the case make sure you are not accidentally making contact with it.
posted by aeighty at 5:41 PM on January 7, 2008 [1 favorite]

This sounds like a symptom of a laptop's touchpad being activated inadvertently. If you're on a laptop and running windows, there might be an option under Control Panel to reduce sensitivity or increase "palm touch" rejection.
posted by exogenous at 5:43 PM on January 7, 2008

My first guess would also be a trackpad issue. Have you recently moved from a PS/2 mouse to a USB mouse, perhaps? PS/2 mice disable most trackpads, while USB mice do not.

Otherwise, I would look for a flakey keyboard sending stupid shortcuts.

Though, both of the problems above should also be noticeable in, say, notepad.
posted by krisjohn at 5:45 PM on January 7, 2008

I had a lot of problems with gmail since the new interface was rolled out slowly.

Many of the problems went away when I updated to the latest version of firefox.

No real idea why, but it solved most of my problems. sometimes I am still unable to type in active fields randomly. Clearly, YMMV. (for me it is not a possible trackpad or hotkeys issue)
posted by shownomercy at 5:56 PM on January 7, 2008

i solved all of my problems with the new Gmail by going into 'settings' and switching my Gmail to the UK version, and it has not reverted.
posted by jamjam at 6:58 PM on January 7, 2008

That happens to me too! I'm in the middle of typing an email, and then I accidentally hit some key or combination of keys that causes it to send? I can't figure out what's going on or what keys I'm pressing that causes this to happen. I didn't realize until now that you could turn off the keyboard shortcuts.
posted by lsemel at 7:12 PM on January 7, 2008

brilliant, jamjam, thanks!
posted by dawson at 11:23 PM on January 7, 2008

Thanks everyone... keyboard shortcuts was already off, so it wasn't that and I didn't change anything like mouse or trackpad or typing style.

So now, I just switched to "UK English" instead of American and it looks like it has reverted to old interface and stayed that way.

Now, of course, they will probably get around to inflicting that on the UK sometime, but in meanwhile, hopefully, this solves it... thanks jamjam! I will let you know if it recurs.
posted by Maias at 12:51 PM on January 8, 2008

The UK thing solved it. Now my emails are tagged with 24 hour time, but I don't care... thanks Mefi!!!
posted by Maias at 6:51 PM on January 9, 2008