Enabling Copy and Paste in Firefox

Firefox Setting copy and paste

Today, I needed to fill out an online web form, and was very frustrated that it was setup to disallow copy and paste. Why would I want to type field values manually, especially important ones, when I can copy and paste them from a password database? I’m sure the web developer thought they were increasing security, but I think they were just increasing the error rate.

So, I went looking for a solution and determined that Firefox allows me to override the web application’s behavior. Here’s how I did it:

  1. Open Firefox
  2. Surf to about:config
  3. Click the “I accept the risk” button
  4. In the search field, enter dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled
  5. Click true so that it now becomes false
  6. Surf to the website you need to use and which previously had disabled cut and paste functionality

Voila! This solution worked for me, and I was able to copy + paste into fields I had been required to manually enter prior to this Firefox setting change.