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A comment on Firefox "Copy" has been inconsistent and broken for 8 months.

Re:Firefox "Copy" has been inconsistent and broken for 8 months by gchamonlive on Friday July 05, 2024 @07:57PM (#40887123)
From the bug report:

    1. Open https://www.google.com/ in a tab

    2. Open https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/ in the same tab

    3. Click on Go back button (or Alt+Left Arrow)

    4. Click on Go forward button (Alt+Right Arrow)

    5. Select some text

    6. Right click
It doesn't seem like it's a website doing something it shouldn't be and breaking RFC. It's really a bug in firefox.

Also, the scope is very specific and kinda justifies it being low priority. Maybe.

Note that there is another reproduction step sequence that I chose not to put in this comment for the sake of simplicity.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Firefox "Copy" has been inconsistent and broken for 8 months by hinkley on Friday July 05, 2024 @08:02PM (#40887161)
It's not generalizable to any arbitrary pair of websites X and Y. Or even X and ftp.mozilla.org. Which I suppose makes sense if it's been in the wild this long without everyone noticing it.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Firefox "Copy" has been inconsistent and broken for 8 months by wackget on Friday July 05, 2024 @08:36PM (#40887294)
I can't reproduce this at all.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Firefox "Copy" has been inconsistent and broken for 8 months by heavyset_go on Friday July 05, 2024 @08:44PM (#40887332)
Can't reproduce it on Wayland
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Firefox "Copy" has been inconsistent and broken for 8 months by FactolSarin on Friday July 05, 2024 @08:47PM (#40887358)
I've recently switched from Firefox to Edge until they fix this bug. Every now and then I go back to Firefox hoping it'll be fixed, and then it bites me again.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Firefox "Copy" has been inconsistent and broken for 8 months by gchamonlive on Saturday July 06, 2024 @11:15AM (#40890890)
Now you have 10 problems. But it's always a matter of choosing the problems you want, I guess.

I might argue that this is quite minor in the face of... well... a Microsoft controlled browser, but what do I know

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Firefox "Copy" has been inconsistent and broken for 8 months by wizzledonker on Friday July 05, 2024 @09:02PM (#40887426)
I can reproduce. Firefox 127.0 under wayland, arch linux
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Firefox "Copy" has been inconsistent and broken for 8 months by heavyset_go on Friday July 05, 2024 @09:14PM (#40887483)
Which compositor? I'm trying on 127.0.2 and can't seem to do it, and I'm on kwin_wayland.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Firefox "Copy" has been inconsistent and broken for 8 months by hunter2_ on Friday July 05, 2024 @09:38PM (#40887586)
There's a joke somewhere in here about trying it locally, but I can't quite... Nevermind.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Firefox "Copy" has been inconsistent and broken for 8 months by throwup238 on Friday July 05, 2024 @09:47PM (#40887629)
It works on my machine!

Repeating that joke over and over again is key to a full career in software engineering.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Firefox "Copy" has been inconsistent and broken for 8 months by hunter2_ on Friday July 05, 2024 @09:50PM (#40887641)
Ah! Perfect. On 127.0.0.1 it works just fine.
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Re:Firefox "Copy" has been inconsistent and broken for 8 months by sgc on Friday July 05, 2024 @10:00PM (#40887685)
I can reproduce as well using FF 127.0.2 on x11, ubuntu. But I can make it even odder. Select the text, right click, copy is grayed out. Hit the back button without any other interaction, then go forward again from google.com and the text will still be selected. Hit right click again, and copy is now possible. Select any other text, and it is working as expected.

So I opened dev tools and saw there were network requests for google.com and play.google.com on the ftp page when it loaded even though there is nothing in the page source that would make those requests. When I force reload with cache disabled, these requests are not present. This looks like bad behavior by google.com somehow leaking into the next page.

So I found another random ftp page, and I can reproduce all of this there: https://ftp.wildfire.gov/public/incident_specific_data/

Is it the lack of js, not something more arcane in the ftp templating on those sites? I can reproduce all of this at http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ which is js free, and also at https://news.ycombinator.com/, which has js (be careful to select something like "### points" below a post, which has no hyperlink)

EDIT: I guess my theory was wrong, because I read at the bottom of the bugzilla:

So the issue here is that when a page goes to BFCache, it'd set the active browsing context to null, and the page that is about to show would update the active browsing context to itself. And these two operations are racy because they are triggered in different processes with different actionId. We are going to explore some potential solutions.

Based on the comments there, by setting BFCacheInParent to false in about:config, this bug is gone for me.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Firefox "Copy" has been inconsistent and broken for 8 months by dishsoap on Friday July 05, 2024 @09:07PM (#40887453)
https://streamable.com/adh0t3
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Firefox "Copy" has been inconsistent and broken for 8 months by JohnTHaller on Friday July 05, 2024 @10:05PM (#40887705)
Confirmed on Windows 10 64-bit with Firefox 127.0.2. After right-clicking, the Copy menu entry is disabled. Switching to another tab and back fixes the issue.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Firefox "Copy" has been inconsistent and broken for 8 months by mrcsharp on Friday July 05, 2024 @11:03PM (#40887900)
I am able to reproduce this but I noticed that Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V still work even though the `Copy` menu item was disabled. So it is a visual glitch, at least on my machine.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Firefox "Copy" has been inconsistent and broken for 8 months by BenjiWiebe on Saturday July 06, 2024 @10:33PM (#40894849)
I've noticed this randomly lately. I think it's this bug anyways. The copy and paste menu items are disabled but ctrl-c/v works. On websites that make no sense to have it disabled.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Firefox "Copy" has been inconsistent and broken for 8 months by penguin_booze on Saturday July 06, 2024 @03:33AM (#40888781)
I'm able to reproduce this on vanilla Linux Mint, FF version 127.0.2.
[ Parent | on HN ]