A while ago I wrote about a bug in GMail’s editor that had to do with indentation.
Found another problem, and this one is worse. GMail will actually move your text around as you’re typing, destroying the content of your email.
This one took me months to figure out how to reproduce repeatedly. It’d happen to me every once in a while, just often enough to be very annoying, just rare enough that it was hard to pin down.
How to Recreate
The problem happens when two conditions are met. One, you are using the KEYBOARD and not the mouse/short-cut buttons to format text. Two, the word with the formatting is the last word on a line that’s been line wrapped.
Play the video below, and note that the last word left on the line after the wordwrap is in italics; more specifically, italics that have been done with Control-I, not with selecting the word and pressing the italic button. On the second line, a new word in italics is started, again by pressing Control-I, and the moment the next character is typed, the problem happens. The formatted word from above is moved to the end of the paragraph.
I was able to recreate this problem in FireFox on both Windows and OS X. Opera on Windows cheats, pulling the formatted text down to the next line with the word that follows. Internet Explorer seems to work fine.