There are other use cases though that aren't supported by PNG, such as vector images and animated images. Or more niche use cases like RAW images.
Animated images could definitely be somewhat useful though, albeit much more niche than static raster images. In most cases where I want an animated image on my clipboard, a link will suffice. What I want may not map to the majority of course, but at least PNG support is a start!
Yes, but I don't think you can set the MIME type. So whatever you paste in would have to be smart enough to look at a text/plain clipboard data and figure out if it looks like an SVG (or whatever).
text/plain
text/uri-list
text/csv
text/html
image/svg+xml
application/xml, text/xml
application/json
So at the very least there's image/svg+xml, but that is pretty limiting.Raster image support should also be able to support stuff drawn on a canvas element, so I think it is a great place to start.
I beg you, do not let websites put things into my clipboard.
Reading/writing clipboards is a problem for sandboxing since they act as a bridge to another layer that otherwise has no contract or understanding of the application. So are many other features not just on browsers but on any application that for some reason needs to handle a gazillion tings (on Linux subscribing to system/user dbus messages is a big issue and out of the box totally unmitigated).
[1] If a monolith like chrome/firefox needs to understand/parse hundreds of protocols, technology-standards, etc, is a challenge to sandbox, maybe it isn't the sandboxing but the application that is the wrong tool for the users threat-model? Note, there is also Tor/Tails/QubesOS if isolation between user-space applications is a serious concern.
I literally implemented support for the navigator.clipboard.write API, with image/png support included, in today's Firefox Nightly version: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1619947
Enabling it on release might take a bit longer though. The specification is currently not in a good shape. And there are some open questions around permissions etc.