Hi BirdieBob, another user reported the same: copying from Firefox 45 and pasting into Thunderbird gives plain text, while it works normally pasting into other applications.

https://support.mozilla.org/questions/1113486

Background: There was a change in Firefox 44 to eliminate some old plain text formats previously placed on the clipboard and that change had to be undone in Firefox 45 because users of Word 97 and CorelDraw said those applications could not paste any of the newer formats.

Somewhere in that process, something else seems to have changed. But at the moment I don't know what it was, or why only Thunderbird seems to be affected.

Hi jscher2000:

Thanks for the feedback and the other posting link. I'm not sure the issue is with Thunderbird since I could copy successfully from IE into TB.

The developers are researching the details of this bug and how to fix it. (No. 1254980) For the time being, pasting into an intermediary application, selecting the HTML there, and copying it again before pasting into Thunderbird appears to be the only workaround.

Or if you find it easier to launch the page in IE and copy from there, you can use the Open in IE extension as a way to speed up that process: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/open-in-ie/

Using 44.0.2, everything works normally.

Using 45.0 gives me plain text copying.

I can use Writer from Libre Office as an go between app to work around this issue.

I like to "email" using Thunderbird, a webpage, then select a portion of the page and paste it in to the email. When I save that email, then I can open it in a new window (view, not edit) and all the links are clickable.

Also, the original behaviour fixed relative link anchors to give full URIs. That is the behaviour I want back. Using Internet Exploder is NOT an option.

Hi affinity, this problem will be fixed in Thunderbird 45.0 when that is released. I don't know the planned release date, but late April or sometime in May seems most likely based on past schedules.

If you wanted to switch to Thunderbird 45 while it is still undergoing beta testing, you could, but if you can tolerate using the workaround for the time being, waiting is probably a better overall choice.

So do we know if the issue is specific to Firefox or Thunderbird yet?

I recently got auto-broke, er, auto-upgraded to Firefox v45.0.1, and I have started having this same problem. I often copy formatted HTML text from an internal web database over to a Thunderbird window, and since that update, I have been unable to do this any more -- it copies over the unformatted text only. Interesting, I CAN paste the HTML into Word2013, so whatever FF is doing, at least that tool seems to like it. However, I find it strange that I have NOT updated Thunderbird recently, and yet it is what broke. I CAN paste to Word, then copy THAT and paste into TB, but this seems a bit senseless, too.

I did try updating TB to 38.7.0, and no joy. I expect that I'll wait for the released copy of TB45.

I reported this on Bugzilla. It has now been identified as a change in posting HTML to the clipboard in Firefox. The change improves the HTML code compatibility with Microsoft applications (primarily Windows and Office) but makes it unreadable as HTML by TB, so TB converts the document to plain text. Gekko and TB are to be updated with a major release between here and May that will resolve the problem. The bug has therefore been classified as "Won't Fix" in the interim.

I've gone back to FF 44.0.2 and will stay there until the TB release is issued. It would have been nice if the "powers that be" held off the change for Microsoft until compatibility with TB could be maintained, especially with such a common and frequently used function.

I think this points up that there are not enough testers using the beta version of Firefox with the stable release of Thunderbird, or this should have been caught before release. Or maybe testers who saw this didn't think to report it as a bug.

This bug has been fully resolved in Firefox 45.0.2 released April 11, 2016.

Thank you. I saw this in the release notes and it is working fine for me now.