I agree with the majority of this. However: > The browser could do a better job of making sure a text selection only includes the expected content (this is not

I agree with the majority of this. However: > The browser could do a better job of making sure a text selection only includes the expected content (this is not just a security issue - I often find that text copied from websites include unexpected words or whitespace). I disagree this is necessarily a good goal for the browser to have, or that it's feasible for the browser to identify what the "expected" text is. Even in the area of stripping extra whitespace, sometimes extra whitespace is expected. It's worth noting that browsers already strip unnecessary whitespace like linebreaks and double spaces by default. The extra whitespace that shows up in text you copy is there because a site deliberately added characters or elements that bypass that behavior (I'm looking at you, Twitter, stop #!&%?@ breaking all your input fields). So relying on signals from the page itself isn't enough to mitigate this problem, since pages give bad signals. The browser would need to be smart enough to know on its own when whitespace was being inserted because it was important, and when it was being inserted to add an extra linebreak or something. I am skeptical that it's possible to build a browser that smart without simultaneously turning it into a buggy, unpredictable mess whenever you encounter edge-case content. My mantra in situations like this is, "don't come up with a solution that is more complicated than the problem you are trying to solve." Most of the solutions I've heard proposed as to how the browser is going to accomplish this sound really complicated, at least to me.