You find a really cool blog post and you decide to copy the title, paste it on Twitter and press “Tweet”. Or you think to send a friend the link, which you copied from a website, by SMS. Unfortunately, the website doesn’t let you copy the text or the link, but instead puts “download xxx here” on your clipboard together with a very naughty link. Result: awkward situations with your friends and a loss of followers.

Many websites do this. There is a little widget, called ShareThis, which automatically puts a default text and a URL on your clipboad, instead of the text that you thought to be copying.

This can be avoided by preventing websites from messing with your clipboard. You can do this by disabling a browser feature, that’s called JavaScript Access. What do you need for this?

Go to the url about:config and scroll down till dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled.

1) Download and install Firefox. IE and Chrome don’t have the required options.
2) in Firefox, open the url about:config and scroll down to dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled. (To open about:config, you often need to create a new window or tab and type “about:config” (without quotes) manually in the address bar, followed by the return or enter key).
3) If the fourth column on this row already says “false”, then you’re done now. If it says “true”, double-click on it to change it into “false”.

From now on, you’ll only copy the selected text and you won’t be posting anything awkward on Twitter and Facebook and Skype anymore.

Note: quite a few forums let you select and copy text automatically. You’d just click on a button and a quotation or source code is automatically selected and copied. After disable JavaScript Access, you can still select the text automatically, but you’ll have top copy the text manually.