Pasting text on facebook breaks input area
Trying to paste into Facebook comment or wall post input area causes weird glitches:
- Pasting creates a phantom text of the paste that can be selected, but cannot be edited or deleted. Page needs to be reloaded to remove glitches.
- Apparently what you type appears behind or before the phantom text. If you try to delete, the default placeholder "What's on your mind?" appears like field was empty, behind the phantom text.
- Sometimes text seems to be pasted twice, but won't get posted at all.
- If paste has line breaks only the part before the first line break gets posted, the rest is lost.
- Pasting WORKS in Chrome
- Pasting WORKS on every other website with Firefox
Using Ctrl+V or RightClick -> Paste has the same effect.
- Restarting, clearing cookies, clearing cache did not help.
- Disabling addons did not help.
- Safe mode did not help.
- The script mentioned here did not help: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1091255
The only thing I did not try was "refresh Firefox" because that would cause a lot of pain, I spent several hours last time I did that with reinstalling all addons, setting everything again, and so on, and I can't afford that now.
Modified by Storm Engineer
Chosen solution
As an emergency workaround for Facebook, try typing a space or other text before pasting.
Did you change the dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled preference to false in about:config? That can cause random fails on websites that intercept pasting. You can double check as follows:
(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button promising to be careful.
(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste clip and pause while the list is filtered
(3) If the dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled preference is bolded and "user set" to false, double-click it to restore the default value of true
Then, to resolve the issue on YouTube while keeping Firefox's default setting, you can use this other workaround that I think you said you already have installed:
(A) Install the Greasemonkey extension from the Add-ons site here: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/
(B) Install the "Fix paste on YouTube" user script from here: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/12433-fix-paste-on-youtube
When installing user scripts, be cautious and check reviews as you would with other kinds of add-ons.
Read this answer in context 👍 6All Replies (3)
Chosen Solution
As an emergency workaround for Facebook, try typing a space or other text before pasting.
Did you change the dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled preference to false in about:config? That can cause random fails on websites that intercept pasting. You can double check as follows:
(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button promising to be careful.
(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste clip and pause while the list is filtered
(3) If the dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled preference is bolded and "user set" to false, double-click it to restore the default value of true
Then, to resolve the issue on YouTube while keeping Firefox's default setting, you can use this other workaround that I think you said you already have installed:
(A) Install the Greasemonkey extension from the Add-ons site here: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/
(B) Install the "Fix paste on YouTube" user script from here: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/12433-fix-paste-on-youtube
When installing user scripts, be cautious and check reviews as you would with other kinds of add-ons.
jscher2000 said
As an emergency workaround for Facebook, try typing a space or other text before pasting.
Doesn't help sadly, the only difference is that the "What's on your mind" placeholder doesn't show up.
Did you change the dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled
Hmmm, it was set to false, but I'm pretty sure I didn't change it manually. Could an addon have changed it?
Resetting that did fix Facebook indeed!
Then, to resolve the issue on YouTube while keeping Firefox's default setting, you can use this other workaround that I think you said you already have installed:
I tried that because somebody claimed it will fix the Facebook issue, which it didn't so I removed. Now indeed YouTube broke and installing that script back fixed that.
Thank you!
But out of curiosity, do you know what is the reason that FB is broken with clipboard events off, and that YT is broken with it on? Sounds pretty silly, especially the latter...
Modified by Storm Engineer
Storm Engineer said
But out of curiosity, do you know what is the reason that FB is broken with clipboard events off, and that YT is broken with it on?
On Facebook, it's not a basic form, there's a lot of fancy scripting that makes it appear the way it does.
On YouTube, I don't know why there is a still a problem after all these months. Google must know exactly what is going on but for one reason or another hasn't modified its script to work in Firefox the same way as in other browsers.