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by uneekname·6y ago·view on hn ↗
I respect and share your goal to educate users about what they should expect from their browser/computer security-wise.

As someone with a (healthy?) distrust of the content I copy/paste, and would never run code I copy/pasted without checking it first (one of the examples given in the linked bug report thread), I would still rather my browser only copy the text that I visibly highlighted. It is annoying to edit content out that I have carefully selected.

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>I would still rather my browser only copy the text that I visibly highlighted. It is annoying to edit content out that I have carefully selected.

Absolutely. But how do we solve that problem and still allow proper usage of it? Removing this feature would break the copy ability of nearly every rich-text-like web-based UI in existence, such as Google Sheets.

Personally, this feels more like something for an adblock-like addon.

The 10 sites that have a genuine reason to listen to selection events and force you to copy invisible text can ask permission to do so, as suggested in the thread.
That still does not answer the question of "what are we asking permission for?"

Why that is a hard question can be understood by reading through the discussions in the OP.

> Removing this feature would break the copy ability of nearly every rich-text-like web-based UI in existence, such as Google Sheets.

Skipping over the technical implementation issues, I'd rather copying rich-text-like be relegated to a "Copy Rich Content" context menu action, and the default copy command be plain text only.

I very seldom want to copy rich content. I very frequently am copy/pasting content to notepad, selecting it, and then copying it again in order to strip out the rich content I don't want.