An incorrect Embed can break text input in Google Chrome

Some weeks ago I had a weird bug in a project I worked on. It was impossible to enter a question-mark in one of my Flex apps. This only happened in Chrome on Windows (7 & XP). After some digging, it turned out that it was also impossible to enter scandinavian characters in Uppercase. Me and a colleague Google’d a bit but couldn’t come up with anything that could point us in the right direction. We also failed at reproducing the bug, so we put it in the backlog.

There it was until today when a campaign site I was working on got the same bug report. This was a competition and the users were unable to register since the @-key didn’t work. With Chrome now at 10% and soon much more I had to find a solution - and I did.

The culprit is actually the Embed-tag! Certain settings here can break certain keys in Chrome. I couldn’t find this logged anywhere so I added it to the bug base with my workaround and posted this on Twitter. It turned out that I wasn’t the only one experiencing this issue and it’s apparently been around for a while. So - I just thought I’d type this up for future reference in case anyone else has the same problem and is looking for an answer 😊