With Firefox on X11, any page can pastejack you anytime (middle button paste)

Post by delecti » Sat, Oct 21, 2023, 6:08 PM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #121

philistine wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but I can say that it is a mode, which is its problem. You enter into the scroll mode and while not difficult per se to exit it can cause confusion. It is also pretty superfluous in the age of the touchpad and the ubiquity of the scroll wheel. Just another example of Microsoft working really hard to make Windows 11 look simpler, but not working on making it meaningfully simpler.

I don't know when middle-click scroll was introduced, but it definitely was before Windows 11, and at least as far back as 7. Also, "no modes" is both a question of personal preference and a sliding scale. Input-has-focus is a mode, too, but getting rid of that would be an obvious mistake.

Post by wavemode » Sat, Oct 21, 2023, 6:13 PM UTC

Aardwolf wrote: post #41

macNchz wrote: post #31

The X “primary selection”/middle click paste behavior this takes advantage of is one of my least favorite Linux features and I have had it disabled for years, so I didn’t even know it had been changed/removed in Wayland. Having a single mouse button (that often has other functionality like autoscroll in Firefox) cause text highlighted in another app to paste in the focused app is super unintuitive to me, and caused a…

I love middle click paste, in combination with ctrl+c/ctrl+v paste it's a second clipboard, which allows to do one kind of refactoring in between doing some other refactoring in code (as just one example). I didn't know wayland doesn't support that either, one more thing to add to the list of things it doesn't support like screenshots, xclip, mouse/keyboard automation, etc...

Post by loxias » Sat, Oct 21, 2023, 6:20 PM UTC

deathanatos wrote: post #117

loxias wrote: post #103

I'm embarrassed that I'm confused enough (ignorance about how webpages and javascript modern things, etc work) to not answer this on my own, but does this mean: 1) Beware! any site you visit can, via javascript, inject whatever it wants into your clipboard (write access) 2) Beware! any site you visit can, via javascript, do whatever it wants with your clipboard (READ and write access) 3) some combination of the above…

It's #1, but it's the primary selection, not the clipboard. On Linux, there's the clipboard, which is the Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V that most people are familiar with. There's also the "primary selection", which is the currently highlighted text. That selection can be pasted into a different app or text box with middle click. So you can really quickly do highlight, middle-click, highlight, middle click. The primary selection is…

Post by hulitu » Sat, Oct 21, 2023, 6:37 PM UTC

Post by arp242 » Sat, Oct 21, 2023, 6:40 PM UTC

cesarb wrote: post #136

arp242 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not. I have that disabled (mostly because I hate how GitHub completely mangles and fucks up anything I paste there) and it still works. Arguably, it's "working as intended" because middle click is supposed to paste whatever is selected, and the JS did select some text. Fixing this in a way that won't cause UX regressions and can't be by-passed relatively easily might be rather tricky.

> [...] and the JS did select some text. Fixing this in a way that won't cause UX regressions and can't be by-passed relatively easily might be rather tricky. One possible approach could be to ignore selections made by JS (instead of directly by the user) for middle click paste. A more refined approach could also allow them when made by JS while handling a mouse click from the user.