1543954 - Need a way for clipboard to indicate if its source data is from the same running instance of Firefox or not

Status: NEW

(Core :: Widget, defect, P3)

Description

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Currently the DataTransfer associated with drag and drop has a mozSourceNode that allows us to determine if the source of the transfer is the same version of Firefox or not.

Unfortunately, it appears that nsIClipboard/nsITransferable do not have this available.

Please could some kind of flag to indicate if the running Firefox instances owns the clipboard or not be added?

Background:

In Places, we have various flavours that allow us to pass around guids when doing drag/drop and cut/copy/paste.

This gives us the advantage that we can easily move bookmarks with these mechanisms.

We've been using an instanceId that gave us the ability to detect if a drop or paste was sourced in a different Firefox or within the same Firefox. However, this breaks WebExtensions (bug 1531539) as they don't have instanceId, and it isn't something we'd want to expose (it does change every session, but there's other reasons as well).

In the case of a move, we could examine the records in the database to see if they are present, but this is an expensive operation, especially for large drag and drops. It may also be unreliable (e.g. someone having used an import/export across profiles).

Hence, if the clipboard can tell us if the running instance owns it or not, then we can avoid the need for the instanceId or any lookups completely.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Possibly, we'd also like to be able to tell if the source of the clipboard data was firefox chrome, a WebExtension, or something else, to reduce the likelihood for cases like bug 1543191

Comment 2

[Liz Henry (:lizzard) (relman/hg->git project)]

Jim, can you help find an owner for this issue? Thanks!

Comment 3

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The priority flag is not set for this bug.
:jimm, could you have a look please?