1704632 - Ask user if they want to use content of clipboard when uploading files

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: File Handling, enhancement)

Description

[L]

Attachment: unknown-5.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/89.0.4371.0 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Try to upload an attachment/image/file (with the "Browse..." button here when you are creating a bug, next to "Attach a file" for example)

Actual results:

As normal, the file selector screen appears letting you pick a file from your hard drive.

Expected results:

A native pre-prompt of sorts should appear where you can select whatever is in your clipboard (if it's a file), and perhaps recently downloaded things, like Opera does.

If nothing is what you need, then you click "show all files" and it brings you to the normal file screen.

The attached picture is how Opera handles it, which I find absolutely brilliant.

Comment 1

[Timea Cernea [:tbabos][inactive]]

Hi Jesse,
Thanks for submitting this request! Moving it over to a component so developers can also review it.

Comment 2

[Anne (:annevk)]

Ideally the OS would handle this kind of integration, including features such as "take a photo", as that would improve the experience across all applications with a file picker. (I personally miss the ability to insert a URL to download something from, but that's probably extension material.)

If we were to include this in Firefox by default that would increase the length of workflows for many people. They'd have to perform an additional click to get the status quo.

Comment 3

[L]

(In reply to Anne (:annevk) from comment #2)

Ideally the OS would handle this kind of integration, including features such as "take a photo", as that would improve the experience across all applications with a file picker. (I personally miss the ability to insert a URL to download something from, but that's probably extension material.)

If we were to include this in Firefox by default that would increase the length of workflows for many people. They'd have to perform an additional click to get the status quo.

Hm. Your call, but let me say I disagree. What does the average user upload the most? And in particular, via a webpage button?
Most things would be likely something downloaded recently (think memes, images, videos), or that you have in your clipboard (screenshots, natively on mac and with lightshot or similar on windows). Since also we assume it's often just one file - as otherwise you'd use FTP or the like - this seems more likely.

On a more personal note, I use Opera a lot (due to the native vpn) and from the few times I use it, it has always come in handy.
Instead of having to go to the folder the file you want to upload is, you just ctrl+c it and then it will insantly appear in the implemented picker.
If not, it takes half a second to click to show the whole file selector.

Moreover, I realize this is OS specific, but on Macos it is so much faster than having to wait for that lame native dropdown file picker.

Just my two cents. Thanks for considering it.

Comment 4

[u693231]

I implemented a version of this as an extension.

Comment 5

[L]

(In reply to Vord from comment #4)

I implemented a version of this as an extension.

I've been testing it for a few days and it works great.

As I said originally, this would make for a nice native feature, akin to Opera's.

Comment 6

[L]

Still think this would be an amazing addition.

Comment 7

[Jon S]

See request on Connect: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/adding-a-upload-menu/idi-p/46824