1278414 - Can only select and copy the version number and architecture type in About Firefox window

Status: NEW

(Core :: DOM: Selection, defect)

Description

[Dan Jacobson]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:47.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/47.0
Build ID: 20160517001237

Steps to reproduce:

Menu Help -> About Firefox.
Try to copy the words 
"Firefox
47.0b5"
with the mouse.


Actual results:

Only could copy 47.0b5.


Expected results:

Able to copy "Firefox 47.0b5" so that I can paste in a news post etc. that I was using Firefox 47.0b5 and not e.g., Chromium  47.0b5 without having to type the word F i r e f o x by hand.

Comment 1

[Cosmin Muntean [:cmuntean], Ecosystem QA]

Attachment: select text.png

Firefox: 50.0a1, Build ID: 20160608030219
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0

I have tested this issue on the latest Firefox (47.0) release and latest Nightly (50.0a1) build on Windows 7, 10 x64 and Mac OS 10.11, and I have managed to reproduce it. Only the browser version can be copied from the "About Firefox" window.
However, you can copy the name and the version of the browser from "about:support" (see attachment).

Comment 2

[Gingerbread Man]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:70.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/70.0
20191030021342

"Firefox Browser" is now an SVG background image and the text is not selectable (chrome://branding/content/about-wordmark.svg). It may be worthwhile to make the distribution type and update channel selectable at least.

Comment 4

[Smylers]

Even the text that is selectable is awkward to select and copy: I came here to report the version number not being selectable at all, and only discovered it was from this bug report.

If the pointer starts a little way to the left of the version number (still as an arrow, not an I-bar), then clicking and dragging over the version number doesn't do anything. Compare this with text on a webpage, where it's possible to click in the left margin of some text and drag from there to select the start of a line (at last on Linux). Apparently that's what I tried, and it not working, it didn't occur to me it would be selectable, just in a different way to what works elsewhere in the browser.

Even now I know, it's much more fiddly to do, having to get the pointer to just the left of the first character; there's very little margin for error between too far left (nothing gets selected) and too far right (the first character gets missed out of the selection).

And having made the selection, there isn't a right-click menu with ‘Copy’ on it, or any other discoverable way of copying. (Ctrl+C does work.)