Keyboard shortcuts not working in Safari and Firefox after update to Yosemite

I have had this exact problem for weeks, and it's been driving me crazy, but I've finally found a solution. I found this thread on the Apple Support Communities, where “stevendeluxe” says the following:

Problem fixed! I compared the system preferences for each user and found out that I had several languages activated in the language/region settings. So I deleted the language adding the option "list sort order". This option wasn't activated in my test account.

You have to try which language is the "bad one" on your system (In my case it was "german"...haha) and delete it. UPDATE: I've tried to re-add the deleted language and still safari works fine.

I did the same, went to “Language & Region” in OS X System Preferences (found in the Apple menu at the top left of the screen), and removed two languages I'd added as a lark (Swiss German and Klingon, to be precise), and after restarting the computer (which OS X requires if you remove the primary language), all my keyboard shortcuts work again. Joy and jubilation.

I hope this works for you, too.


My problem was Command-Shift-Option-V (Paste and Match Style) which would just give me right-pointing double angle quotation mark ('»').

Per my experience there may be at least three things that might have something to do with this apparent bug (2011 Early MBP with SSD and did a clean Yosemite install by the way if anyone's wondering).

  1. You have only one system language selected (in my case a minor language like Finnish).
  2. You only have created a single user account.
  3. You log in automatically.

Merely adding and setting English as a primary system language didn't solve this issue.

It seems that only after I had created a new temporary user account, logged in with that user AND/OR optioned out to log in automatically, things finally went back to normal.

The bug didn't return after I had deleted English system language and switched back to Finnish. Nor when I deleted the temporary new user account. Or when I reverted back to automatic log in.

For future reference I think it may be a wise decision to hold on to the English system language (even if you will never use it)...