728992 - “View Selection Source” does not update X Primary Selection (for middle-click paste)

Status: NEW

(Core :: General, defect)

Description

[Dan Jacobson]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:12.0a2) Gecko/20120217 Firefox/12.0a2 Iceweasel/12.0a2
Build ID: 20120217042010

Steps to reproduce:

Highlight part of a page.
Now in the right menu click View Selection Source.
Now we are viewing the source, with the selection highlighted.
Now right click and pick "copy".
One finds the stuff copied was the highlighted previous page's rendered
text selection, not the highlighted area in the source we thought we
were copying!
If I wanted that I would have clicked "copy" back when looking at the
rendered page.

Comment 2

[Dan Jacobson]

I was talking purely about the action of "copy".

Comment 3

[Jesse Ruderman]

Sorry for the premature dupage.

I think I understand what you're saying now, but I'm having trouble reproducing the problem on my own computers (using Firefox 13 nightlies on Mac and Linux).

Can you provide more detailed steps to reproduce -- which page I should try it on, what to select, and what to paste into? You're pasting with a "paste" command and not with the middle mouse button, I hope?

Comment 4

[Dan Jacobson]

(In reply to Jesse Ruderman from comment #3)
Thanks. Mainly I'm pasting into e.g., shell windows outside of Firefox,
where there is only the X clipboard's middle button I suppose.

I now see that actual Pastes into various Textboxes inside Firefox work
as expected. So it is only the effort to copy to outside of Firefox that
isn't working.

To do that one must carefully painstakingly rehighlight the already
highlighted text, then "copy" does what is expected.

Indeed, no special clicking of 'copy' is needed.

Comment 5

[Jesse Ruderman]

I think it's unusual for selections made by software, rather than by users, to end up in Primary.  In some cases it would be a security hole if they did.  I'm not a big user of Primary, though, so I could be wrong.  (I use Ubuntu's terminal, which supports pasting from the clipboard with Ctrl+Shift+V and menu items.)

Comment 6

[Dan Jacobson]

(In reply to Jesse Ruderman from comment #5)
Hmmm, you have some good points. Maybe there could be an additional 'copy pre-selected text to clipboard' or something.

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Can you still reproduce?

Comment 8

[Dan Jacobson]

I can still reproduce it!
Don't: Just highlight some words within this paragraph.
Do: Highlight part of this page, including a few avatars.
Now you should be able to see what I am taking about with the steps in Comment 0.