From an e-mail I wrote:

Is this the problem you are having? I’ve had it ever since I’ve installed Firefox, but whenever I mention it to anyone they have no idea what I’m talking about and apparently don’t experience it:

Firefox problem: Sometimes I’ll put my mouse into a textarea or a textbox and start typing, but instead of entering text into the text area, it starts searching for what I type within the page. I can re-click inside the text field as many times as I want and try to type some more, but Ff always jumps to text-search mode. Even when I have turned OFF the “find as you type” search, Ff ignores my textbox input in those instances. I find that the fix is, when this is happening, to minimize and then restore/maximize Ff, which causes the problem to go away for that window as I can then type into text boxes.

Anyway, if that’s the problem you’re having, that’s also the workaround for it. It doesn’t happen that often, now, but when it does it’s irritating since the behavior is randomly different and doesn’t seem to be connected to anything logical, on the surface.