The title says it all.
Sneaking should prevent you from falling off a block. In 1.4.3 it doesn't prevent you from falling off a chest. Might be related to the fixed hitbox of chests.
I have seen that enderchests have been updated too, so it might happen there too. Atm you can sneak on enderchests in 1.4.3, which contradicts the behaviour of normal chests
Also affects soul sand.
Related issues
is duplicated by
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As of 1.4.5 sneaking on Enderchests fails too.
This is also the (rather infamous) case with soul sand (the bug's as old as time itself), and with extended upward-facing pistons (extend while you have a block above your head to allow yourself to stand on the piston despite the head being in the way).
Shh, Ethos fall trap will not work any more then xD
Happens with chests, cakes and more. darn
I tested about this and it looks like the game checks if there is danger to fall off & take damage. Only things should be fixed are : Cake, 3 kinds of chest, Cactus. Other blocks are ok because there's no danger to fall off.
Confirmed in 1.6.1 and 1.6.2
Affects 1.7.2

Confirmed for 14w21b for repeaters and comparators next to the block you are standing on
Isn't this how sneaking is intended to work? It's been this way since Alpha when it was added. Sneaking only protects you from falls of 1 block or higher.
@@unknown: The problem here is that you can fall of a cliff if you sneak off a chest which is on the edge of that cliff. You fall off the chest because the drop is less than a block, but sneaking speed is still fast enough to have you miss the block and fall off.
@Fenhi: Yes, but to prevent these issues would be complicated. Every time you sneak near an edge, it would have to calculate your velocity and see if you would land safely or not, less than one block below where you were.
This would be working as intended. The issue here is really that one key does many different things:
Hide your name tag and muffle footsteps in PvP.
Slow you down to improve movement precision or balance PvP.
Prevent dangerous drops.
Prevent drops at all.
See also MC-2404 which is closely related.

Confirmed for 1.8.

i would mark this as working as intended, shift prevents you from falls that are 1 block high or more, for less than 1 block fall it does not prevent falling
Hmm... It looks like chests and ender chests are the only blocks with this problem in 1.8. Any other partial block prevents falling.
If there's less than a block of distance between you and the block below, you can fall off. If there's more than one block of distance, you don't fall off. However, you can fall off chests all the time, no matter the amount of distance. That's bug here.

The main issue is that chests have a hitbox smaller than a full block (both horizontally and vertically), causing you to fall off, but still miss the remainder of the block under the chest. Making the chest have a full hitbox (either horizontally or vertically) would fix the issue.
Indeed. If there's a full block underneath a chest, there's a 1/16 block edge you would land on if you killed your lateral momentum. If you remove that block or substitute a smaller block like a fencepost, a bottom slab, or even another chest, you can't sneak off of the chest. Not to say it isn't worth changing because its behavior is predictable in the end. Unequivocally bad behavior is still bad. It should try harder to stick to invariants it purports to profess, not chicken out of literal edge cases.

Confirmed for 1.8.2-pre1 (also with cacti).
Why is this considered a bug? Sneaking only prevents a fall of one or more blocks. Otherwise you couldn't sneak off of things like slabs or snow.

Confirmed for 1.8.7.
Could someone please fix the description? It hasn't been updated since 1.4.3 and is completely misleading (and wrong about ender chests). It seems to be saying that sneaking should prevent a fall of any distance, which of course would be a ridiculous change. The actual problem here is that some blocks (like chests) have a smaller hitbox (both height and width), and if they are on the edge of a long fall, sneaking will still allow you to fall off because it detects the small ledge below them. It is possible to stand on the ledge, but due to the fact that players can adjust their momentum in midair, you will often keep holding a movement key for too long and miss the ledge. So this isn't really a bug, just a rather annoying feature of how sneaking works. Some possible ways to fix this are:
Change the chest hitbox back to a full block. It could still be transparent on the edges, so it needn't be a visual change. This problem would still occur elsewhere, but few people have complained about other blocks, so it's not as much of a problem.
Remove the player's ability to move around in midair. This would make players always fall onto the ledge, unless they were moving faster than normal before they fell off. I also think that this would be a nice change anyway, as I see no reason the player should be able to move around when there's nothing to stand on. The air control is sometimes useful in in survival, but it's not used that much and I don't think removing it would be a problem. It is helpful in creative, so hopefully it would be left in there.
Change sneaking so it will check for a fall of 3/4 of a block (or some other amount) instead of 1. This would fix chests, soulsand, tall stacks of snow layers, etc. Smaller falls like slabs and beds would still work as before.
Have the game automatically move the player towards a landing place when falling. Not a big movement, just enough to have them land on the ledge. Basically the same speed as the player's air control, just with faster reaction time.
Change the sneaking check so that it checks for a specific hitbox size below in the direction the player is trying to move. It would require at least, say, half a block of space to land on before it lets the player fall off.
Have the game check the hitboxes below and the player's momentum to ensure that if it let the player fall off, they would land on something. This would be quite hard to implement and would still fail sometimes due to air control. It could either assume while checking that the player will be controlling away from the ledge, or could be implemented along with suggestion #2 or #4.
@@unknown finally someone else who sees this isn't a bug... The first two solutions are kind of game breaking and the last, as you said, hard to implement. I think the third is definitely a good option to fix this.
This and MC-2404 are really the same thing. Over there you can find more about the merits (or lack thereof) of particular solutions.
A single-frame tap makes you move about a fifth of a block, on ground which slows you down more than air. You'd still fall off if you killed air control, but now leaving no way to compensate. Air control is rather important in games, too.
A different threshold can solve some individual cases, but never staircases.
I think an invisible barrier in mid-air is best in the end. Its task should be to make sure that if the game sees something below that allows you to sneak off of something, you will land on it when doing so. It could be made to only work at low momentum, or there could even be a bit of state that tracks when you snuck off that way, to prevent it from stopping you when it really shouldn't.
MC-2404 is actually completely different. That one is about the fact that air control can move you in midair. It's even less of a bug than this one.
An "invisible barrier in mid-air" is exactly the same as regular sneaking. What matters is when the game lets you fall off (when it removes the barrier).
I would argue that MC-2404 is about the bug you are describing; once falling, it is possible to end up falling more than 1 block because holding down the sneak key doesn't do anything while in midair. This ticket describes how it is possible to fall off blocks that are shorter than 1 block tall even if you don't end up falling more than 1 block in total. I wouldn't say that this is obviously intended or a bug, but I will mark it so that Mojang can choose.
These two issues are different problematic aspects of the same mechanic, is what I'm saying. You can't ignore the other one. It's best to think about the mechanic and what it should do, to solve it all.
I would describe the current sneaking mechanics as making the rear of your bounding box snag on edges. When I say invisible barrier, I mean you'd snag as though the block underneath you were moved up to your feet, provided you're pretty close (e.g. within a block) and not moving too fast. Perhaps it could be disabled while the player is still moving up, so players won't have an even harder time sneaking down full blocks (to keep their name tag hidden in PvP). If you jump you'll reach over the one-block barrier at the apex anyway, and you're not exactly asking not to fall.
That's an interesting idea, but it would lead to the player floating in midair if they were on, say, a fence post above a full block.
What? You simply wouldn't fall off, exactly as things are now. The suggested mechanic just tries to minimize your final fall damage by constraining horizontal movement. If there's no way to do that (because you started sneaking when it was already too late), you will fall all the way to the void if that's how things are.
Please explain better what you mean. I'm not understanding what you are proposing.
Affects 15w50a.
Affects 16w02a.
Affects 16w04a.
Affects 16w05b.
Affects 16w06a.
Affects 16w07a.
Affects 16w07b.
Affects 1.9-pre1.
Affects 1.9-pre3.
Affects 1.9-pre4.
Affects 1.9.1-pre3.
Affects 1.9.2.
Affects 16w20a.
Affects 1.10
Confirmed for 1.10.2.
Confirmed for both chests and ender chests.
It only happens when the block below the chest has a hitbox that extends beyond the edge of the chest. The same thing happens with end portal frames when there is an open hatch on the block below them.