647100 - Context menu actions fail when highlighted text is dynamically hidden

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 678800

(Firefox :: Menus, defect)

Description

[James Donohue]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0

My first bug. So here goes...

The right-click context menu won't allow me to copy or search for highlighted text if that text occurs in a (certain type of) dynamic pop-up menu. I'm not a web developer, so I can't speak to the technical details.



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Hover over the element that triggers the pop-up menu
2. Select some text and invoke the context menu
3. Move the cursor to the Copy option
4. Note that the pop-up menu disappears (behind the context menu)
5. Choose Copy
6. Attempt to paste the copied text
Actual Results:  
No text is copied to the clipboard; the paste fails. Previous data in the clipboard is cleared.

Expected Results:  
The text should be copied to the clipboard. This is the result in FF v3.x and older.

The Copy option will fail, as will the Search for option. Choosing Search for will simply open the search provider's home page in a new tab. See bug 616331 for a discussion to that end. Bug 616331 doesn't mention the impact on the copy option...nor is this the same bug as it suggests the affected site is de-selecting the text as opposed to "hiding" it. FWIW, I also disagree with the "minor" rating for bug 616331.

Comment 1

[James Donohue]

In the URL referenced in the bug, one may invoke the pop-up menu by hovering over the word "Demos" at the top. Then, try double-clicking in front of the puzzle piece icon before the word "Android". This will select the word, as expected. If you then right-click that selection and choose Copy from the context menu, you will observe the bug as described.

The bug critically impacts my experience on http://meebo.com. Anyone familiar with that site knows that a hover action over a buddy in the buddy list triggers a pop-up with some details about that buddy, including their status. In FF v3.x I was able to highlight (and copy) status messages written in foreign languages and paste the text into a translator. In FF v4.0 I cannot copy the text because of this bug.

Comment 2

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

Thanks James for reporting this issue. I can reproduce it with Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0

Can you please test the beta releases of Firefox 4 and check which of those has introduced this issue? Those builds you can find here:

http://stage.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/

Thanks!

Comment 3

[Thomas Ahlblom]

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0

When I follow the instructions in comment 1 I get "AndroidAndroid" (yes, Android twice) in the clipboard. The copy/paste functionality in Linux differs from the one in Windows and Mac. Probably the text is grabbed as soon as I've double-clicked.

Comment 4

[(mostly gone) XtC4UaLL [:xtc4uall]]

Last good nightly: 2010-05-24
First bad nightly: 2010-05-25

Pushlog: http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/pushloghtml?fromchange=da9e50cb4091&tochange=ffbc3baf03ae

=> Bug 39098

=> Duping to already filed Bug 678800.