1578321 - Consider exposing clipboard.readText to web content

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: DOM: Copy & Paste and Drag & Drop, enhancement)

Description

[Xidorn Quan [:xidorn] UTC+10]

It is initially implemented in bug 1479935 but only exposed to WebExtensions. However, there is no such restriction in the spec, so supposedly it should be exposed to the web content, especially that Chrome has already been doing so.

I don't see any bug tracking that, so created one. Please dup if there is already any.

Comment 2

[Anne (:annevk)]

Presumably this would also make document.execCommand('paste') work?

Safari's UI of showing an inline "Paste" contextmenu item seems like a reasonable UI approach here that keeps the user in control over the clipboard. (They only show this when the page wasn't the source of the data on the clipboard, which seems reasonable, though also gives away some information.)

(What's a bit worrying though is that the specification isn't maintained. I raised pretty serious issues with the write() method last year that are still unaddressed. And it would have been better if these methods also worked for drag-and-drop, but I guess with Chrome and Safari shipping blocking on that is somewhat futile.)

Comment 4

[Tom S. (please needinfo tschuster)]

Would it be possible to make clipboard.readText work in paste events? I think this might help with situations like this on stackoverflow where the code isn't using the event.clipboardData information for some reason.

Comment 5

[Anne (:annevk)]

What does Safari do?

Comment 6

[martin.boksa]

I still do not understand why Firefox has not exposed this API to basic websites. Other modern browsers did it a long time ago.
Please, any reason? In our product is not possible to create a custom context menu with paste only due to Firefox.

Please, just expose 'readText'. You can do it 💪

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Clipboard_API check compatibility

Comment 7

[Gatien]

On our app it's not possible, in a modern and secure way, to create a simple paste button. We are forced to remove this functionality for firefox users :/ Please expose it 😇

Comment 8

[Mirko Brodesser (:mbrodesser-Igalia)]

For the record: we'll add a "Paste" button for this, similar to Safari's. The rationale can be found at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1O7gHaPS7G1IuNg2yv5PXX6-T9-h6QVaWGeLwpkLlbVA/edit?usp=sharing.

Comment 9

[Mirko Brodesser (:mbrodesser-Igalia)]

The "consideration" part was resolved with c8. The actual implementation will happen in bug 1744524.