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Comment by chdir | Hacker News Reader

Should I consider my browser betraying me by selecting stuff that's outside the viewport without a hint / warning ? (absolute positioned element, (-100,-100)). It's simply too convenient to copy/paste from the browser.

P.S. I have a paranoid habit of pasting copied text into the address bar or a notepad to quickly check for unwanted characters. For once, I don't feel like I'm crazy.

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I think it's incredible that most of the comments here seem to accept or even defend that this is just the way things are, even explaining all the ways they work around it, rather than considering that this is a serious browser security issue and violates the idea that software should generally do what the user expects.

It's because for the browser the visual selection is not the same as the textual selection. I'd say this qualifies as a browser bug rather than a user failure. What you see is not what you get.

Start programming editors and you will understand. What you see in a rich text editor contains hundreds of debugging flags and formatting tweaks. When copying, you want to copy something clean which will paste nicely in Word or Excel. And you want to add some metadata, so you can trace is source if it's pasted back in one of your editors.

This is an edge case. Most of the time your average user is after the text and not the shitty formatting.

Copy-Paste as WYSIWYG should be default, Copy-Special should be an expert-only option.

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