This is something that's been annoying me for a while. With the current trend towards "rich web applications" it seems that some application developers are doing something funky with textarea elements to allow the pasting of styled text… GMail, Yahoo Mail etc.
At least this appears to be the case with Firefox. When copy & pasting something from another HTML page (or another application) into one of these special textareas, any formatting is preserved. Now in MS Office and LibreOffice (on Windows at least) this is traditionally solved by having a "Paste Special" menu where you can choose what you want to paste, with/without formatting and many other options. There doesn't appear to be any such equivalent in Firefox.
I already have the "Copy link name" extension to Firefox which allows me to strip out all the hyperlink guff and just copy the visible text. But that only works for hyperlinks.
Actually most of the time when pasting between websites, I don't want to carry over the formatting from the other one.
Just wondering if there's a config option to paste plain text in Firefox? And ideally an addon so you can quickly toggle that option?
Cheers, B
Best Answer
I've been using a Firefox extension named Extended Copy Menu (fix version) for a long time. It adds "Copy as Plain Text" and "Copy as Html" items to the Edit menu (in addition to the regular "Copy" command). Using the former causes all the formating to be stripped out of the selected text before it's placed on the clipboard.