626226 - Copy/paste stops working

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 613915

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[sierbahnn]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0b10pre) Gecko/20110116 Firefox/4.0b10pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0b10pre) Gecko/20110116 Firefox/4.0b10pre

After working a while with Firefox, switching tabs and tabgroups, entering/leaving private browsing, just normal surfing, copy/paste does not work. It appears that either the "copy" does not take hold, and nothing gets moved to the clipboard, or the "paste" does not import it from the clipboard. I cannot tell which one it is.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
I have no idea when this occurs, only that it does, and that it didn't with the older version of Firefox, leading me to believe it has to do with the new version.

Comment 1

[Tim (fmdeveloper)]

Does the issue still occur if you start Firefox in Safe Mode? http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode

How about with a new, empty profile? http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Basic+Troubleshooting#Make_a_new_profile

Next time it happens, check if the 'Copy' feature is greyed out at the time and provide where the issue occurs

Comment 2

[Luke Iliffe (Harlequin99)]

These seemingly random failures of copy/paste on Windows XP are probably dups of bug 613915. See bug 613915 comment 99. However it can be hard to reproduce.

Comment 3

[Ben]

Yes, Paste is greyed out.  Also, it is not possible to paste FF text into any other app or paste text previously copied in another app into FF when this happens.  Affects Betas 8 and 9 but not 7.  I'm also using XP.

On one occasion I also got a pop-up error message: 'GetLastError: Not enough storage is available to process this command.'  (Nothing in the Error Console.)

The only way to restore copy/paste functionality seems to be to restart the browser.  It's not clear exactly when the bug starts, but never just after startup, even with many tabs open.

Comment 4

[Luke Iliffe (Harlequin99)]

Bug 613915 is a hardblocker for a firefox beta so should be fixed before the RC.

Comment 5

[Ben]

Having read threads for bugs 613915 and 331878, it's worth pointing out that I always run Firefox as a limited user.  It sounds like the OP for 613915 does this also, as well as the poster of 331878, of course.  If it would be helpful for me to re-install Beta 9 and run with admin rights let me know.  I imagine this would get around the bug, but obviously not good practice to do so.

For any other commenter experiencing this bug it would probably be useful to indicate whether running as limited or full user.

Comment 6

[IU]

(In reply to comment #5)
> For any other commenter experiencing this bug it would probably be useful to
> indicate whether running as limited or full user.

Does not matter.  Don't waste your time trying.  All of my experiences with the bug were as an admin user.  My bug 613915 comment 76 was a rejection -- not support -- of the misunderstanding that this happens only with limited rights.

Comment 7

[Ben]

OK, IU - I see now how you were implying your experiences were under an admin environment.

NB. While I wouldn't have been running flash video clips in each instance there would probably have been fairly complex flash games running, and I've had ongoing problems with these in Fx4 - namely poor or no internet data transfer while game window in focus (and plugin-container.exe crashes in Fx3).