Not sure why this is big news, big enough to be in the #1 spot right now. From reading the comments on the bug, it seems to be an issue that's hard to reliably reproduce, and -- despite how simple it sounds from the editorialized HN title -- it involves interactions between different parts of the browser, and it's hard to track down and fix.<p>Nonetheless, there are some proposed fixes, and I expect a near-future release will have one of them.<p>This isn't that stereotypical "simple bug has been sitting around unresolved for years because (arrogant|understaffed|uncaring) developers can't be bothered" story that is unfortunately all too common in software (and not just open source software -- we just don't get to see it on a public bug tracker when it's in a proprietary product).<p>This is the process <i>working</i>.
From the bug report:<p><pre><code> 1. Open https://www.google.com/ in a tab
2. Open https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/ in the same tab
3. Click on Go back button (or Alt+Left Arrow)
4. Click on Go forward button (Alt+Right Arrow)
5. Select some text
6. Right click
</code></pre>
It doesn't seem like it's a website doing something it shouldn't be and breaking RFC. It's really a bug in firefox.<p>Also, the scope is very specific and kinda justifies it being low priority. Maybe.<p>Note that there is another reproduction step sequence that I chose not to put in this comment for the sake of simplicity.
This happens often enough to notice (I have seen it a few times) but not really often enough to seriously frustrate me. At least on Wayland it's enough to unfocus and focus the Firefox window for me, then Copy is not greyed out anymore.<p>I know the kneejerk reaction is "how could something so basic be broken in any way???" but realistically I think it's just a testament to how complex the entire codepath of something as simple as a "copy" menu item has gotten. I mean reading the bug report, it looks like it weaves in and out a surprising number of different components in complex ways involving IPC. It makes sense but at the very least I still never <i>think</i> of a simple UI element like a copy button having this much going on.
Specifically the right-click menu option, which is often greyed out for no apparent reason. This happens on both Windows and Linux. Ctrl+C still works, but how does Firefox break something as basic as the right-click menu and copy in 2024?
They're also deleting downloaded .pdf whilst in private mode. Yes even when I click save as. It gets downloaded to my downloads folder and then sometimes it's deleted when I close the browser. Sometimes.
Oh my God! I thought it was just me and some silly "we only enable copy for sites without iframes (or something security related) feature". I was quietly hoping someone here had the secret "type 'unprotected pasted' in the devtools console" solution
I get that maintaining browsers is hard, but it feels like Firefox has been slowly falling behind in terms of supporting and expanding on its core functionality. I experienced this copy bug for a long while now (for some reason, visiting Wikipedia seems to trigger it most often), and any such hitches seem to take months to resolve. It took five months[1] for Mozilla to fix an issue that made YouTube borderline unusable, especially on higher resolutions. Features like HDR video support have been requested for years and are seemingly not coming despite every other browser supporting it for ages. And yet, there's no viable non-Chromium alternatives.<p>[1] - <a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1878510" rel="nofollow">https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1878510</a>
> <i>Per comment 72, the team responsible for this bug is working to fix it. More +1 and advocacy comments aren't helping that happen faster but are adding unnecessary noise to this bug. A reminder that there are etiquette expectations when interacting in Bugzilla - it's not a free-for-all discussion forum.</i>
<a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html" rel="nofollow">https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html</a><p>> <i>I'm restricting comments to keep further discussion focused where it needs to be on fixing this bug and getting it into a shipping release as soon as can be reasonably done.</i>
Gawd, I can't wait[1] for this to be fixed. It's been annoying the %*^@ out of me for a couple of months now. The only saving grace is that Ctrl+C still works, but it's still frustrating as hell. :-(<p>That said, I'm not gonna slag the Mozilla developers over it. I have places where I wish the Firefox crew approached certain things differently, and I've criticized them for not being responsive to the community in the past. But this seems like something that isn't easy to fix, but which they are committed to fixing. So I'm happy to just wait it out.[2]<p>[1][2]: "can't wait" -> metaphorically speaking, of course. :-)
I try to use Firefox a lot. One of the main issues I have is 4K video on YouTube gets stuck and skips a lot of the time on Windows 11 when using Firefox. I’ll then just play it on chrome and it plays flawlessly. It’s not the internet connection (1 Gbps) and not the graphics card (4080). Anyone else having this issue?
I thought I'd stuffed up my system clipboard, or sites had found some way to obfuscate with JS or something. Very frustrating bug. I don't know if it's reassuring to me to find it's not user error in this case, given it hasn't been fixed.
It happened to me two or tree times on Wikipedia. When selecting text and right click, the copy item was disabled, I restarted Firefox and the copy field was enabled. Is funny how I never stopped to think about it till now seeing this post.
They seem to be working on it: <a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1863246" rel="nofollow">https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1863246</a>
Overall, Firefox is wonderfully fantastic these days.<p>I can see how this is frustrating to some, but sometimes that's how the priority nets out. It looks like the bug was triaged, investigated, took its time finding its way to the right developers, and now a fix will land soon.<p>This is mostly just the process working. I for one, am grateful for these folks' good work.