I had the exact same reaction to this site a few days ago.
Don't touch my clipboard
11–20 of 322 posts
Re: Don't touch my clipboard
#12There used to be a time when we could hope that browsers would put users first and disable dark patterns like these. Now, there are so many advertisers that use Tynt and related services to muck with copy/paste that it wouldn't surprise me if the major browsers are incentivized to leave this alone and let users suffer.
> disable dark patterns like these
Clipboard access isn't guaranteed to be a dark pattern, though. It's an API that the browser supports.
I dislike clipboard access 99% of the time, but it's actually useful in a few UIs (like copying keys in AWS). Should it really be up to the browser to determine that an API is always a dark pattern?
Honestly, most of the worst dark patterns of the web are enabled by regular , , and elements -- which is to say, they're not something the browser can unilaterally decide are "evil".
Re: Don't touch my clipboard
#13This hijacking “feature” that’s been a part of news and other proprietary content sites for more than a decade now: https://moz.com/ugc/copymagicpaste-a-script-and-easytousegui... Anecdotally speaking, I’ve seen it a lot less these days; mostly, I see it when copy-pasting from my Kindle app. I’ve rarely ever seen it for a site this general-purpose (and trivial) though
It’s been around for so long a clipboard-jacking-as-a-service company, Tynt ( https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/tynt ), launched, lived and exited. If telling people not to do this was going to be enough to solve the problem, we wouldn’t still be talking about it. The browser vendors really need to shut it off once and for all.
And they have 100-250 employees?!
Re: Don't touch my clipboard
#14The wrongest thing about this, from my perspective, is that my browser fires off a js 'copy' event when I press control-c. There are times when I've found it helpful that a browser can copy text to my clipboard when I click a button, but I can't think of a single time when I want a site to react to my attempt to copy text off if it.
Is there any way to configure my user agent (Firefox) not to do this? A hack is ok.
Re: Don't touch my clipboard
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s been around for so long a clipboard-jacking-as-a-service company, Tynt ( https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/tynt ), launched, lived and exited. If telling people not to do this was going to be enough to solve the problem, we wouldn’t still be talking about it. The browser vendors really need to shut it off once and for all.
And they have 100-250 employees?!
I'm sure most of it was just keeping wit the latest JS standard
Re: Don't touch my clipboard
#16This hijacking “feature” that’s been a part of news and other proprietary content sites for more than a decade now: https://moz.com/ugc/copymagicpaste-a-script-and-easytousegui... Anecdotally speaking, I’ve seen it a lot less these days; mostly, I see it when copy-pasting from my Kindle app. I’ve rarely ever seen it for a site this general-purpose (and trivial) though
It’s been around for so long a clipboard-jacking-as-a-service company, Tynt ( https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/tynt ), launched, lived and exited. If telling people not to do this was going to be enough to solve the problem, we wouldn’t still be talking about it. The browser vendors really need to shut it off once and for all.
For the lazy but curious, here's a random Wayback Machine link to their former homepage: https://web.archive.org/web/20140207123808/https://tynt.com/
Re: Don't touch my clipboard
#17Really, the web just gets more and more vile towards users.
Sure, highly technical folk are capable of working around this all -- but the vast majority of people do not have a browser that is _working for them_:
- You have little to no control over what content you are seeing. Instead, it is chosen for you.
- A large number of videos (not even including movies and shows) are geographically blocked. You cannot access them.
- Developers are actively trying to prevent: Saving images[1][2][3], selecting text[4][5], browsing on a mobile phone[6][7], and a whole slew of other normal user actions I don't care to cite: preventing users from going back, manipulating their browser history, asking for notification and geolocation permissions, displaying full-screen modals that block content access, scroll-jacking, click-jacking, and more.
But don't worry! It's not all doom and gloom, websites like Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, banks, and more are heavily pushing their users away from the web to mobile applications where you have ZERO choice.
And we're going to maintain this backwards-compatible stack of completely volatile pieces of anti-patterns until that migration to "apps" is complete, and you can no longer distinguish between the app on your phone monitoring everything you do or the site running 5 different layers of VMs and doing the same -- albeit a bit slower.
[1] https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/122922/discoura...
[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21110130/protect-image-d...
[3] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35897974/how-to-prevent-...
[4] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16805684/javascript-disa...
[5] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8365272/disable-copying-...
[6] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10177456/how-to-disable-...
[7] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22618724/how-to-disable-...
Re: Don't touch my clipboard
#18I agree and share the frustration.
A stock Apple application "Books" does something similar as well. When copying text -- using keyboard shortcut or the context menu rendered as soon as you lift your mouse (another tragedy) -- your clipboard will look something like the following (2 lines):
“”
Excerpt From: . “.” Apple Books.
That gets written to your clipboard; quotes and everything.
Re: Don't touch my clipboard
#19The wrongest thing about this, from my perspective, is that my browser fires off a js 'copy' event when I press control-c. There are times when I've found it helpful that a browser can copy text to my clipboard when I click a button, but I can't think of a single time when I want a site to react to my attempt to copy text off if it. Is there any way to configure my user agent (Firefox) not to do this? A hack is ok.
about:config -> dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled = false
You can't do it through a user agent, though
Re: Don't touch my clipboard
#20I wish clipboards worked like emacs yank buffers. Then you wouldn't have this problem.