Hacker News Reader

Comment by QasimK | Hacker News Reader

I really dislike websites that prevent the use of password managers by disabling the ability to paste. Recently[0], I discovered that you can stop websites from doing this in Firefox by setting dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled = false. This has already improved my quality of life slightly.

[0]: https://gist.github.com/0XDE57/fbd302cef7693e62c769

View on HN

While true, it’s a bit of a blunt force solution as it prevents all clipboard events (e.g. no ‘click here to copy’ anymore).

That may be a reasonable compromise for some, but I’ve seen some weird broken behaviour as a result of people using this FF toggle.

Could you have an extension with a toggle that turns it off temporarily only for password entry? Or even better UX, integrate it into the password manager extensions such that the temporary action is invisible to the end user? It would toggle the switch off during login, and toggle it back on after.

Perhaps it's not a good idea to code too much browser-specific behavior into this stuff on the other hand.

There's an extension already that does that. It's called Don't Fuck with Paste or something like it.

Isn’t this the default behaviour in Safari though? That’s a browser that’s used by a lot of mobile phones, and it doesn’t seem to be problematic enough for it to be changed.

I think this is what Safari does at least, because the Google website tells me to hold and copy the links instead of just holding it like on my Android phone.

There's some sort of counter to this I have it enabled but Facebook still prevents me from pasting (sometimes! Pasting deletes the rest of the comment and closes the reply box, super annoying). Some sites still prevent password pasting too -- but I've found you can drag-drop in both situations to work around the restriction.

On Chrome, you can install the 'don't fuck with paste' extension.

I already set this to false so that news websites can't hijack my copy functionality to insert "Read more: <tracking link>" at the end of anything I copy from the article.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com