484045 - Javascript can be used to disable copying

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: General, defect)

Description

[dpk]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.7) Gecko/2009021906 Firefox/3.0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.7) Gecko/2009021906 Firefox/3.0.7

When you select text on http://abcnews.go.com/ and hit command-C to copy, browser jumps to the top of the page, the selection is cleared, and nothing is copied to the clipboard. You can still copy text by selecting it and copying with the context menu.

http://www.snopes.com/ also uses some Javascript trickery to prevent selecting text, but you can get around it with command-A to select all of the text.

Firefox should not be allowing websites to disable basic browser functionality, using Javascript or other methods.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to http://abcnews.go.com/ with Firefox's default settings.
2. Select some text.
3. Press command-C.
Actual Results:  
The browser jumped to the top of the page and nothing was put in the clipboard.

Expected Results:  
The selected text should have appeared in the clipboard and the browser should not have jumped to the top of the page.

Comment 1

[Isaac P]

Doesnt work with me

Comment 2

[bryan.christ]

I have the same problem.  Snopes is using the above mentioned trick to block text selection for copy and paste.  I was able to use the ctrl-a but that seems unnecessary.

Comment 3

[bryan.christ]

I am using Firefox 3.5b4 on Fedora 11 x86-64.