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Copy / Paste complexity (thelemmy.club)
submitted 3 days ago* by to c/programming@lemmy.ml
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This might be yelling into the void more than a bit: why does every program now try to demand that they have a pop-up context-stealing menu when I copy & paste?

The attached image is in Firefox using MS Outlook and Google Docs. When I copy & paste between the two I have two options:

  1. Normal Ctrl-v - which will keep all formatting and fuck everything up because every copy & paste defaults to HTML/Markdown styles and it's just some text from one document to another.

  2. Shift Ctrl-v - which historically stripped the HTML/Markdown formatting and just pasted the ASCII/UTF-16 characters (what I almost always want). But over the last year and some, every tool has started adding some kind of context menu with the paste. I don't know which program or website/app/js/plugin/control each one belongs to. The worst part: they're context switching! So, if I paste with shift-ctrl-v it pastes the plain text and then locks out my keyboard.

If the act of copy-paste is now a multi-key combo followed by esc and/or mouse and/or a timeout it's basically a horrible workflow UI. WTF is up with everyone? Why can't we leave the copy-paste system to be taking characters from one location to another? I'm so very tired of trying to turn off yet more "help" that I never asked for. What's the motivation here for the developers?

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[–] 2 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Because Firefox does not allow/support clipboard access through JavaScript. Microsoft decided to apply this workaround on all of their web software. Unfortunately, this one is for Mozilla to fix.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1068472

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  • [–] 3 points 3 days ago (2 children)

    Well, I'm on Windows11 with Firefox at work, and can cobfirm that Ctrl v and Ctrl Shfi v both works as described in the post when I copy from old outlook and past into an Azure ticket.

    The issue is, as explained in your link, because websites what a fucking access with JS to the clipboard. Firefox rightly protect us from the websites just looking to our copied password.

    If the website just did nothing it would work by default. But they feel the needs to capture right click, and all Ctrl * shortcut to re-implement them in JS. A few years ago their webapp even broke next/previous buttons (that exist near the reload button and are binded on most mouse) all so they won't show they are loading the next page to the user.

    TL;DR webdev are lazy, clumsy especially in large Corp.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 days ago (1 child)

    They implemented the workaround on all of their web apps, probably poorly tested. But it does make sense after all. It is annoying but it works everywhere. We Firefox users are a minority, and they have little incentive to spend resources on us.

    Anyways, imho this issue in particular should be fixed by Mozilla. Microsoft can implement workarounds, but I think the real solution is implementing JavaScript clipboard access API. Firefox can show the usual "This website is trying to access your clipboard. [Allow] [Reject] [Always reject]" message, and I would say that would be safe enough.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 days ago

    Which workarous? They just want JS access to the clipboard and it is rightfully blocked by Firefox.

    The correct workaround is to not use JS to access the clipboard and suddenly everything work as intetended as if the browser already does the right thing.

    Do nothing and it works, some call that magic 🌌

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