455890 - Select All also selects hidden elements on the page

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 39098

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Sami Tolvanen]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1b1pre) Gecko/20080903020504 Minefield/3.1b1pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1b1pre) Gecko/20080903020504 Minefield/3.1b1pre

Select All + Copy copies all hidden elements on the page to the clipboard, causing potential confusion and anger in unsuspecting users when they paste the text somewhere.

For example, if a page contains the following code, Select All would also select unwanted profanities, while a manual selection of the entire text would not:

<font color="#990000">Bad example</font>: Mozilla crashed. <span style="display: none;">You suck!</span>

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Select All
2. Copy to clipboard
3. Paste somewhere
Actual Results:  
Any hidden text on the page gets copied along with visible content.

Expected Results:  
Most users probably expect Firefox to copy only what's actually visible on the page.

This is reproducible at least on Firefox 3.0 and newer.