Explainer for visual order caret movement in bidi text#1304
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sambandaru wants to merge 3 commits intoMicrosoftEdge:mainfrom
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Explainer for visual order caret movement in bidi text#1304sambandaru wants to merge 3 commits intoMicrosoftEdge:mainfrom
sambandaru wants to merge 3 commits intoMicrosoftEdge:mainfrom
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utpathak
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Apr 17, 2026
utpathak
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Apr 17, 2026
utpathak
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utpathak
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dandclark
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| - Web developers building multilingual editing experiences | ||
| - Accessibility users who rely on consistent and predictable caret behavior | ||
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| User research with Arabic–English bilingual users confirms that almost all participants expect visual caret movement — Left always moves left, Right always moves right — regardless of script direction. |
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Again, is there anything more specific we can share about what user research was done?
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Same as comment above. https://microsoftapc-my.sharepoint.com/:w:/g/personal/prashasingh_microsoft_com/IQBmQdITYWCYRqBUtV0ygufVAc_2_w2NVqNE5-fvB3pxIxg?e=IbVn8L. This is an internal study
Updated references
| 2. **WHATWG Selection API -- `Selection.modify()`:** https://w3c.github.io/selection-api/#dom-selection-modify | ||
| 3. **Firefox `bidi.edit.caret_movement_style` preference:** https://kb.mozillazine.org/bidi.edit.caret_movement_style | ||
| 4. **macOS TextKit 2 — NSTextSelectionNavigation:** https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/nstextselectionnavigation/direction | ||
| 5. **Chromium M76 visual navigation removal:** https://crbug.com/972750, https://crbug.com/834765 |
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I don't have access to the first of these bugs, and the second one is an Extensions bug that seems unrelated (wrong link?). Is there more you can say about why this was removed in the past?
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I have referenced the correct PSA now.
Apparently, it was because the behavior was too difficult to maintain with LayoutNG.
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Chromium currently uses logical (DOM-order) caret movement, which causes the caret to jump unpredictably at bidi boundaries. This explainer proposes switching to visual caret movement - Left always moves left, Right always moves right. The feature will be gated behind the BidiVisualOrderCaretMovement feature flag.
This aligns Chromium with Firefox and Safari, which already default to visual caret movement.