Obnoxious Javascript, Part 1
I was reading this wonderful article by Johann Hari on the fashion industry, and wanted to send a short blurb (specifically “twenty-stone James Corden”) to a friend over IM. So I did what I always do, I highlighted the text and hit Ctrl+C.
When I went to paste it, however, I was confronted with this on my clipboard:
twenty-stone James Corden
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/why-have-we-stopped-ragin_b_287915.html
NO. No no no no no. Stop right there, Huffington Post.
There are certain behaviors that websites shouldn’t have the ability to change. Disabling context menus is one of them. Resizing your browser upon page load is another. Hiding the status bar is yet another. And automatically adding promotional text to my clipboard is very near the top of that list.
One of the reasons Firefox originally became so popular among the tech crowd is that it allowed the user to disable those obnoxious behaviors. It’s your browser, not the website’s, and you should have ultimate control over it. That means the site has no right to alter your browser appearance, take away browser functionality, or otherwise hijack your experience (I’m looking at you, NYTimes…).
If this annoys you as much as it annoys me, I highly suggest you contact them and let them know. In the meantime, if you’re lucky enough to be using a proxy or filtering software (hello, Adblock Plus), add this path to your block list:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/include/lib/copy_paste.js
Problem solved.