6 ms·

Copy and Paste context menu entries sometimes disabled when they should not be

144 points by 462436347 2y ago

462436347 2y ago
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?
- clipsy 2y ago
  [flagged]
- lightedman 2y ago
  The website you are visiting might be breaking it. There are many sites which will force that option to grey out upon right-click. This is by design.
  - goda90 2y ago
    Many websites will also prevent highlighting text as well. Reader mode is helpful for that.
    - db48x 2y ago
      Or just hold down shift, at least in Firefox. This avoids sending the events to the javascript on the page so that the user can act on the page without being blocked, while still using a page’s own context menu if it really does provide a useful one (Google Docs, for example, has one with actual editing actions in it).
  - walrus01 2y ago
    It's the duty and responsibility of a properly implemented browser to not allow a "website" to break basic UI functionality because it pushes some javascript. I don't care about how Safari and chrome and edge do it. Firefox should not follow their lead. This is a fine example of why people install plugins like ublock origin and similar.
    - db48x 2y ago
      Firefox does it best here, because you can hold shift to get the original context menu back when the page blocks it or provides their own.
      - freedomben 2y ago
        Exactly. There are legitimate use cases for hijacking the right-click menu to make it better. For example, Google docs, GMail, etc. The best solution IMHO is the shift key to get the normal menu. It's the best of both worlds.
  - 462436347 2y ago
    > The website you are visiting might be breaking it. There are many sites which will force that option to grey out upon right-click. No, this is a new thing that happens on sites that weren't and aren't doing that. Also tab-switching fixes it.
    - wormius 2y ago
      I'm pretty sure that merely tab-switching hasn't fixed it for me. I've done both mouse and alt-tab, i've ctrl-w'd the tab and ctrl-shift-T'd it. I've opened the same site in a new tab and it still wouldn't work. I've had to completely shut the browser down. Maybe it's different between Windows and Linux, perhaps (I'm using Windows for this). Maybe there's more than one cause, but the reason I hate this bug so much is because simple fixes like just alt-tabbing or even closing and re-opening or full-reload doesn't work. I'm like 99% certain that's the case. I'll have to verify next time this happens. It seems to happen at least a couple times a month.
      - stuffoverflow 2y ago
        Clicking the URL bar once always fixes it for me.
- db48x 2y ago
  Because the bug involves sending and receiving messages to multiple other processes. Each webpage you visit is potentially in a different process, and each of those processes maintains its own selection state (that state is visible to javascript running in the page, and you don't want to leak what you copy on this page to any other, so it would be hard to put it anywhere else). There is only one context menu though (in the main process), so it has to send a message to the content process to find out if anything is selected or not. It seems that somehow the message is going to the wrong content process, to a page where nothing is selected. The context menu itself then displays exactly the right thing, based on the data it got back.
  - teruakohatu 2y ago
    I hear what you are saying but the entire architecture is build around IPC message passing. A lot of user interaction will work the same way. There is nothing inherently more difficult about this scenario than many others within Firefox. If it has such a convoluted code path that it cannot even be debugged then that’s an issue with the architecture, not that the user has a crazy difficult edge case which every other browser seems to manage. Judging by the comments a lot of people in this thread have been affected by this issue.
    - kibwen 2y ago
      > Judging by the comments a lot of people in this thread have been affected by this issue. I'm sincerely surprised by how many people on Hacker News are apparently copy/pasting with the context menu rather than using Ctrl+C. PSA for some common keyboard shortcuts: Alt+Left to navigate back (Alt+Right to navigate forward) Ctrl+T to open a new tab (Ctrl+Shift+T to reopen previously closed tab) Ctrl+N to open a new window (Ctrl+Shift+N to reopen previously closed window) Ctrl+Shift+P to open a new private window Ctrl+W to close the current tab (Ctrl+Q to close all windows) Ctrl+R to reload the page (Ctrl+Shift+R to do a forced reload of cached assets) Ctrl+Plus to zoom in (Ctrl+Minus to zoom out, Ctrl+Zero to reset zoom level) Ctrl+Tab to focus the next tab in line (Ctrl+Shift+Tab for the previous tab in line) Alt+One to focus the first tab (Alt+Two for the second tab, etc.) Ctrl+F to search the text of the page (/ (forward slash) for quick find)
- TaylorAlexander 2y ago
  I have been affected by this one on my Ubuntu desktop for months. It is very annoying! Ctrl+C also works for me, but I am so used to right clicking it really throws me off.
- soupbowl 2y ago
  This has been driving me crazy on both Windows and Linux as you say.
- alexfromapex 2y ago
  This has been happening to me on MacOS as well
gchamonlive 2y ago
From the bug report: 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 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. Also, the scope is very specific and kinda justifies it being low priority. Maybe. Note that there is another reproduction step sequence that I chose not to put in this comment for the sake of simplicity.
- hinkley 2y ago
  It's not generalizable to any arbitrary pair of websites X and Y. Or even X and ftp.mozilla.org. Which I suppose makes sense if it's been in the wild this long without everyone noticing it.
- wackget 2y ago
  I can't reproduce this at all.
- heavyset_go 2y ago
  Can't reproduce it on Wayland
- FactolSarin 2y ago
  I've recently switched from Firefox to Edge until they fix this bug. Every now and then I go back to Firefox hoping it'll be fixed, and then it bites me again.
  - gchamonlive 2y ago
    Now you have 10 problems. But it's always a matter of choosing the problems you want, I guess. I might argue that this is quite minor in the face of... well... a Microsoft controlled browser, but what do I know
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
ivanjermakov 2y ago
I'm not surprised by "8 months" part. There were bugs not fixed for decades.
- usr1106 2y ago
  Which is not specific to Firefox. Nearly all software has those, including expensive commercial products.
- kelnos 2y ago
  And this bug will likely be fixed soon. 8 months for a bug that's hard to reproduce, and seems to involve some unexpected interactions between various browser components in a complex code base... yeah, that seems fairly reasonable.
facialwipe 2y ago
I switched to Edge because of this bug.
- askonomm 2y ago
  I got scared away from Edge with its 10 dark pattern popups you get when you first open it. I haven't had such a horrible experience in a long, long time.
  - gessha 2y ago
    No good browser.
    - Krssst 2y ago
      There's the one with some bugs and the one that actively steps on your consent.
    - krsdcbl 2y ago
      its a conundrum. WebKit is a great engine, but nearly all good implementations are provided by Corps who's interests have very little to do with providing a good browser, and lots to do with what you do with that browser. Firefox in turn might be one of the last major alternative Engines that is maintained by a company who's mission indeed is in a large parts to provide you with a good browser, but seems to progressively struggle to do so, while the engine is a good part of that problem aswell. I find it harder and harder to deal with the many issues in daily usage -- and from a dev standpoint, FF is slowly surpassing Safari as the main blocker for being able to adopt new web frontend features. I dearly hope Mozilla can get back on track. Accessing the open web shouldn't end up depending on a pick of Google, Microsoft or Apple.
      - riffic 2y ago
        *whose mission
        2y ago
tecleandor 2y ago
Ha! My dad was telling me this was happening on his Mac, but I didn't believe him!
- 462436347 2y ago
  I use Linux, so initially I assumed it was some weird Linux thing. Until it happened on my father's brand-new Win-11 notebook. This is embarrassing and disappointing. I'm old enough to have used the Mozilla Suite (now SeaMonkey) betas in 2001 and had no reservations recommending early stable versions to friends and family members over IE. Same with Firefox ten years ago. Now? If asked what I'd recommend, I'd honestly tell them idk.
  - tecleandor 2y ago
    Funny thing is I use Firefox beta and developer editions a lot in Mac and Linux devices and haven't had a problem yet with this bug... (Also my dad is a bit messy with computers sometimes, that didn't go in favor of his credibility)
riiii 2y ago
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.
- zoomTo125 2y ago
  about:config and set this to true "browser.download.start_downloads_in_tmp_dir"
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  That's really worrying. Can you reproduce it?
  - riiii 2y ago
    Quite a lot of the time yes. But the existing bug tracker issue is full of comments and a disgruntled employee has locked further comments.
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 2y ago
  It's not a bug, it was designed this way: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1790641#c11 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1790641#c11 That being said, I hate it, it's awful UX. If something is in the "Downloads" folder, it should never be automatically removed, it's not "Temp". Not to mention that there's absolutely no indication in the UI that your downloads will be deleted. Also, there's no obvious way to make the downloaded file permanent, other than manually copying it outside the "Downloads" folder.
  - lupire 2y ago
    Comment on the bug. Private mode should save to a Downloads/temp folder, and the Download/Save UI should offer an "export/keep" function.
- dzaima 2y ago
  Oh, so that's why some files sometimes are auto-forcibly-downloaded into the usually-unused download directory which I had named ~/Downloads/wtf-firefox/ for now-obvious-but-previously-noticable "what the fuck" reasons. Didn't know that it was being emptied behind my back though!
tekni5 2y ago
Super annoying bug, you can fix it by clicking url bar and then trying right click again and it fixes it temporarily until next time.
montroser 2y ago
Overall, Firefox is wonderfully fantastic these days. 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. This is mostly just the process working. I for one, am grateful for these folks' good work.
- kelnos 2y ago
  Yeah, if this was some bug that had been languishing for years without anyone caring to look at it, I'd consider this a stain on Firefox's reputation. But that's not what's happening: it's a bug that manifests in what probably looks to the user like a simple way, but tracking down the problem and fixing it is not simple at all. People are working on it, and it looks like it'll be fixed in a public release before too long. Agree: this is the process working.
- krsdcbl 2y ago
  Yet this is a single example that actually was resolved, while far from the only inconsistencies and bugs. While from an engine side, the situation with bugs lingering for years, and web features that still can't be used way, way after even Safari managed to implement them is not insignificant. It's not broken or actually bad software, but it's struggling to keep up with the Browsers it's meant to be an independent alternative for. This makes UX and feature parity a HUGE concern! Loosing market share through inconveniencing users in turns means web devs will have increasingly less incentive to. work around it's quirks and issues, which even further shifts the Browser market towards a handful of huge, profit oriented companies - which is without exaggeration a threat to maintaining an open web.
SuperNinKenDo 2y ago
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.
clircle 2y ago
Ah ok, I thought everyone was coordinating on breaking copy, not the browser itself!
alexfromapex 2y ago
Whoa I thought it was just me
kelnos 2y ago
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. Nonetheless, there are some proposed fixes, and I expect a near-future release will have one of them. 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). This is the process working.
- localfirst 2y ago
  i thought i was crazy but had enough times where copying didn't work and i thought it was my computer but seems i wasn't crazy
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- Lorin 2y ago
  If anyone is curious about another 'fun' Windows only bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1856462 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1856462
- oefrha 2y ago
  This post has 100 points right now and there are already 10+ people in the comments saying they have experienced it. Given the typical distribution of lurkers, I’d say a good proportion of the votes come directly from people who think they’re affected. Probably more people wrongly attribute this kind of annoyance to websites. Bugs in popular software just affect more people, hard to reproduce or not. Not sure why you’re so defensive and eager to shut it down that you have to post a barrage of comments to this thread, including saying roughly the same things in three comments.
- 2y ago
bjconlan 2y ago
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
Cerium 2y ago
I can't believe so many people on HN use the right click copy menu.
- tavavex 2y ago
  Most websites I interact with use the mouse only (writing text aside) - navigation alone can always be done with just the mouse. So, it's often easier and faster to use the context menu if your other hand isn't already on the left side of the keyboard.
jchw 2y ago
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. 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 think of a simple UI element like a copy button having this much going on.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tavavex 2y ago
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. [1] - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1878510 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1878510
dyauspitr 2y ago
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?
- tssge 2y ago
  I've had a similar issue with YouTube and it turned out to be AV1. You seem to have quite new GPU compared to me so I guess AV1 isn't a likely culprit, but perhaps Firefox is unable to offload AV1 to the GPU even if supported? For me this caused YouTube to use CPU for AV1 decoding (as my GPU has no decoding support), resulting in stuttering, dropped frames etc. I disabled AV1 support in my browser so that YouTube is "forced" to serve me VP9 and after that video decoding was offloaded to my GPU resolving the issue. YouTube started serving AV1 by default rather recently for the higher bitrate quality settings.
karmakaze 2y ago
Why are they ever? I thought it was a User Agent not a corp agent.
mindcrime 2y ago
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. :-( 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] [1][2]: "can't wait" -> metaphorically speaking, of course. :-)
pentagrama 2y ago
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.
altairprime 2y ago
> 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. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html > 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.
tistoon 2y ago
They seem to be working on it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1863246 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1863246

144 points by 462436347 2y ago

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?

clipsy 2y ago
[flagged]
lightedman 2y ago
The website you are visiting might be breaking it. There are many sites which will force that option to grey out upon right-click. This is by design.
- goda90 2y ago
  Many websites will also prevent highlighting text as well. Reader mode is helpful for that.
  - db48x 2y ago
    Or just hold down shift, at least in Firefox. This avoids sending the events to the javascript on the page so that the user can act on the page without being blocked, while still using a page’s own context menu if it really does provide a useful one (Google Docs, for example, has one with actual editing actions in it).
- walrus01 2y ago
  It's the duty and responsibility of a properly implemented browser to not allow a "website" to break basic UI functionality because it pushes some javascript. I don't care about how Safari and chrome and edge do it. Firefox should not follow their lead. This is a fine example of why people install plugins like ublock origin and similar.
  - db48x 2y ago
    Firefox does it best here, because you can hold shift to get the original context menu back when the page blocks it or provides their own.
    - freedomben 2y ago
      Exactly. There are legitimate use cases for hijacking the right-click menu to make it better. For example, Google docs, GMail, etc. The best solution IMHO is the shift key to get the normal menu. It's the best of both worlds.
- 462436347 2y ago
  > The website you are visiting might be breaking it. There are many sites which will force that option to grey out upon right-click. No, this is a new thing that happens on sites that weren't and aren't doing that. Also tab-switching fixes it.
  - wormius 2y ago
    I'm pretty sure that merely tab-switching hasn't fixed it for me. I've done both mouse and alt-tab, i've ctrl-w'd the tab and ctrl-shift-T'd it. I've opened the same site in a new tab and it still wouldn't work. I've had to completely shut the browser down. Maybe it's different between Windows and Linux, perhaps (I'm using Windows for this). Maybe there's more than one cause, but the reason I hate this bug so much is because simple fixes like just alt-tabbing or even closing and re-opening or full-reload doesn't work. I'm like 99% certain that's the case. I'll have to verify next time this happens. It seems to happen at least a couple times a month.
    - stuffoverflow 2y ago
      Clicking the URL bar once always fixes it for me.
db48x 2y ago
Because the bug involves sending and receiving messages to multiple other processes. Each webpage you visit is potentially in a different process, and each of those processes maintains its own selection state (that state is visible to javascript running in the page, and you don't want to leak what you copy on this page to any other, so it would be hard to put it anywhere else). There is only one context menu though (in the main process), so it has to send a message to the content process to find out if anything is selected or not. It seems that somehow the message is going to the wrong content process, to a page where nothing is selected. The context menu itself then displays exactly the right thing, based on the data it got back.
- teruakohatu 2y ago
  I hear what you are saying but the entire architecture is build around IPC message passing. A lot of user interaction will work the same way. There is nothing inherently more difficult about this scenario than many others within Firefox. If it has such a convoluted code path that it cannot even be debugged then that’s an issue with the architecture, not that the user has a crazy difficult edge case which every other browser seems to manage. Judging by the comments a lot of people in this thread have been affected by this issue.
  - kibwen 2y ago
    > Judging by the comments a lot of people in this thread have been affected by this issue. I'm sincerely surprised by how many people on Hacker News are apparently copy/pasting with the context menu rather than using Ctrl+C. PSA for some common keyboard shortcuts: Alt+Left to navigate back (Alt+Right to navigate forward) Ctrl+T to open a new tab (Ctrl+Shift+T to reopen previously closed tab) Ctrl+N to open a new window (Ctrl+Shift+N to reopen previously closed window) Ctrl+Shift+P to open a new private window Ctrl+W to close the current tab (Ctrl+Q to close all windows) Ctrl+R to reload the page (Ctrl+Shift+R to do a forced reload of cached assets) Ctrl+Plus to zoom in (Ctrl+Minus to zoom out, Ctrl+Zero to reset zoom level) Ctrl+Tab to focus the next tab in line (Ctrl+Shift+Tab for the previous tab in line) Alt+One to focus the first tab (Alt+Two for the second tab, etc.) Ctrl+F to search the text of the page (/ (forward slash) for quick find)
TaylorAlexander 2y ago
I have been affected by this one on my Ubuntu desktop for months. It is very annoying! Ctrl+C also works for me, but I am so used to right clicking it really throws me off.
soupbowl 2y ago
This has been driving me crazy on both Windows and Linux as you say.
alexfromapex 2y ago
This has been happening to me on MacOS as well

gchamonlive 2y ago

From the bug report: 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 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. Also, the scope is very specific and kinda justifies it being low priority. Maybe. Note that there is another reproduction step sequence that I chose not to put in this comment for the sake of simplicity.

hinkley 2y ago
It's not generalizable to any arbitrary pair of websites X and Y. Or even X and ftp.mozilla.org. Which I suppose makes sense if it's been in the wild this long without everyone noticing it.
wackget 2y ago
I can't reproduce this at all.
heavyset_go 2y ago
Can't reproduce it on Wayland
FactolSarin 2y ago
I've recently switched from Firefox to Edge until they fix this bug. Every now and then I go back to Firefox hoping it'll be fixed, and then it bites me again.
- gchamonlive 2y ago
  Now you have 10 problems. But it's always a matter of choosing the problems you want, I guess. I might argue that this is quite minor in the face of... well... a Microsoft controlled browser, but what do I know
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

ivanjermakov 2y ago

I'm not surprised by "8 months" part. There were bugs not fixed for decades.

usr1106 2y ago
Which is not specific to Firefox. Nearly all software has those, including expensive commercial products.
kelnos 2y ago
And this bug will likely be fixed soon. 8 months for a bug that's hard to reproduce, and seems to involve some unexpected interactions between various browser components in a complex code base... yeah, that seems fairly reasonable.

facialwipe 2y ago

I switched to Edge because of this bug.

askonomm 2y ago
I got scared away from Edge with its 10 dark pattern popups you get when you first open it. I haven't had such a horrible experience in a long, long time.
- gessha 2y ago
  No good browser.
  - Krssst 2y ago
    There's the one with some bugs and the one that actively steps on your consent.
  - krsdcbl 2y ago
    its a conundrum. WebKit is a great engine, but nearly all good implementations are provided by Corps who's interests have very little to do with providing a good browser, and lots to do with what you do with that browser. Firefox in turn might be one of the last major alternative Engines that is maintained by a company who's mission indeed is in a large parts to provide you with a good browser, but seems to progressively struggle to do so, while the engine is a good part of that problem aswell. I find it harder and harder to deal with the many issues in daily usage -- and from a dev standpoint, FF is slowly surpassing Safari as the main blocker for being able to adopt new web frontend features. I dearly hope Mozilla can get back on track. Accessing the open web shouldn't end up depending on a pick of Google, Microsoft or Apple.
    - riffic 2y ago
      *whose mission
      - 2y ago

tecleandor 2y ago

Ha! My dad was telling me this was happening on his Mac, but I didn't believe him!

462436347 2y ago
I use Linux, so initially I assumed it was some weird Linux thing. Until it happened on my father's brand-new Win-11 notebook. This is embarrassing and disappointing. I'm old enough to have used the Mozilla Suite (now SeaMonkey) betas in 2001 and had no reservations recommending early stable versions to friends and family members over IE. Same with Firefox ten years ago. Now? If asked what I'd recommend, I'd honestly tell them idk.
- tecleandor 2y ago
  Funny thing is I use Firefox beta and developer editions a lot in Mac and Linux devices and haven't had a problem yet with this bug... (Also my dad is a bit messy with computers sometimes, that didn't go in favor of his credibility)

riiii 2y ago

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.

zoomTo125 2y ago
about:config and set this to true "browser.download.start_downloads_in_tmp_dir"
wizzwizz4 2y ago
That's really worrying. Can you reproduce it?
- riiii 2y ago
  Quite a lot of the time yes. But the existing bug tracker issue is full of comments and a disgruntled employee has locked further comments.
xeeeeeeeeeeenu 2y ago
It's not a bug, it was designed this way: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1790641#c11 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1790641#c11 That being said, I hate it, it's awful UX. If something is in the "Downloads" folder, it should never be automatically removed, it's not "Temp". Not to mention that there's absolutely no indication in the UI that your downloads will be deleted. Also, there's no obvious way to make the downloaded file permanent, other than manually copying it outside the "Downloads" folder.
- lupire 2y ago
  Comment on the bug. Private mode should save to a Downloads/temp folder, and the Download/Save UI should offer an "export/keep" function.
dzaima 2y ago
Oh, so that's why some files sometimes are auto-forcibly-downloaded into the usually-unused download directory which I had named ~/Downloads/wtf-firefox/ for now-obvious-but-previously-noticable "what the fuck" reasons. Didn't know that it was being emptied behind my back though!

tekni5 2y ago

Super annoying bug, you can fix it by clicking url bar and then trying right click again and it fixes it temporarily until next time.

montroser 2y ago

Overall, Firefox is wonderfully fantastic these days. 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. This is mostly just the process working. I for one, am grateful for these folks' good work.

kelnos 2y ago
Yeah, if this was some bug that had been languishing for years without anyone caring to look at it, I'd consider this a stain on Firefox's reputation. But that's not what's happening: it's a bug that manifests in what probably looks to the user like a simple way, but tracking down the problem and fixing it is not simple at all. People are working on it, and it looks like it'll be fixed in a public release before too long. Agree: this is the process working.
krsdcbl 2y ago
Yet this is a single example that actually was resolved, while far from the only inconsistencies and bugs. While from an engine side, the situation with bugs lingering for years, and web features that still can't be used way, way after even Safari managed to implement them is not insignificant. It's not broken or actually bad software, but it's struggling to keep up with the Browsers it's meant to be an independent alternative for. This makes UX and feature parity a HUGE concern! Loosing market share through inconveniencing users in turns means web devs will have increasingly less incentive to. work around it's quirks and issues, which even further shifts the Browser market towards a handful of huge, profit oriented companies - which is without exaggeration a threat to maintaining an open web.

SuperNinKenDo 2y ago

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.

clircle 2y ago

Ah ok, I thought everyone was coordinating on breaking copy, not the browser itself!

alexfromapex 2y ago

Whoa I thought it was just me

kelnos 2y ago

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. Nonetheless, there are some proposed fixes, and I expect a near-future release will have one of them. 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). This is the process working.

localfirst 2y ago
i thought i was crazy but had enough times where copying didn't work and i thought it was my computer but seems i wasn't crazy
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Lorin 2y ago
If anyone is curious about another 'fun' Windows only bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1856462 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1856462
oefrha 2y ago
This post has 100 points right now and there are already 10+ people in the comments saying they have experienced it. Given the typical distribution of lurkers, I’d say a good proportion of the votes come directly from people who think they’re affected. Probably more people wrongly attribute this kind of annoyance to websites. Bugs in popular software just affect more people, hard to reproduce or not. Not sure why you’re so defensive and eager to shut it down that you have to post a barrage of comments to this thread, including saying roughly the same things in three comments.
2y ago

bjconlan 2y ago

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

Cerium 2y ago

I can't believe so many people on HN use the right click copy menu.

tavavex 2y ago
Most websites I interact with use the mouse only (writing text aside) - navigation alone can always be done with just the mouse. So, it's often easier and faster to use the context menu if your other hand isn't already on the left side of the keyboard.

jchw 2y ago

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. 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 think of a simple UI element like a copy button having this much going on.

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tavavex 2y ago

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. [1] - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1878510 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1878510

dyauspitr 2y ago

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?

tssge 2y ago
I've had a similar issue with YouTube and it turned out to be AV1. You seem to have quite new GPU compared to me so I guess AV1 isn't a likely culprit, but perhaps Firefox is unable to offload AV1 to the GPU even if supported? For me this caused YouTube to use CPU for AV1 decoding (as my GPU has no decoding support), resulting in stuttering, dropped frames etc. I disabled AV1 support in my browser so that YouTube is "forced" to serve me VP9 and after that video decoding was offloaded to my GPU resolving the issue. YouTube started serving AV1 by default rather recently for the higher bitrate quality settings.

karmakaze 2y ago

Why are they ever? I thought it was a User Agent not a corp agent.

mindcrime 2y ago

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. :-( 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] [1][2]: "can't wait" -> metaphorically speaking, of course. :-)

pentagrama 2y ago

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.

altairprime 2y ago

> 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. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html > 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.

tistoon 2y ago

They seem to be working on it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1863246 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1863246