I think you may be confusing two different things.
Anyone using Firefox (or any other browser) can copy and paste anything simply by highlighting it and press Ctrl+C to copy or Ctrl+V to paste, just like you can on any web site.
However, Firefox has limitations that prevent Webmasters from creating a button on the page that copies text to the clipboard when you click it or pastes the contents of the clipboard when you click it.
That is called "scripting the browser", and it is purposely limited so that a web site could not secretly look a the contents of your clipboard without you knowing it.
For example, if you were in your word processor and copied and pasted your Social Security Number in a document, that SSN stays on the clipboard, in case you wanted to paste it multiple times, right?
So if you then went into a web page, and there was no copy/paste security in your web browser, a web site could capture the contents of your clipboard — in this case stealing your SSN that you conveniently placed there for them.
This is one of the major reasons people should no longer be using IE 5 or IE 6, and should be upgraded to IE 7.
IE 5 and IE 6 do not have any warning mechanism to let you know that a web site is looking at your clipboard. IE 7 introduced a warning box that makes you confirm if you want a web site to access the clipboard, so it is impossible for a web site to look at an IE 7 user's clipboard without their knowing. As opposed to IE 5 and IE 6 users, who will never even know it's happening.
Back to Firefox: Instead of providing a warning message, the makers of Firefox simply decided not to allow any web site access to the clipboard, no matter what. (There are ways a user can configure the browser to allow access, but 99% of users will never go through the difficult process.)
That's why the Lottery Post Rich Text editor's Paste button does not do anything in Firefox. Because Firefox does not allow it. If instead you were using IE 7, you could click the Paste button, and it would show a warning message. When you click "Allow", it will do the paste.
So, that's the basics of copy/paste. Let me talk about one more point:
The real security issue is Paste, not Copy. An un-secured Paste would allow a bad web site to view your clipboard, but an un-secure Copy is no big deal, because Copy does not reveal anything to a bad web site. It simply moves the highlighted text into memory on your computer, so that's just fine.
Within the past two weeks I added a really nice convenience feature (which I referred to earlier in this thread) for copying content to the clipboard on any browser with a single button click.
I'm not going to get into great technical depth, but I stumbled upon a technique being used on some technical web sites for copying to the clipboard, and when I saw it I almost fell out of my chair. I can't understand why the technique isn't getting more press, but that's not really my concern; I was just ecstatic that I found a way to do it.
The technique is only for doing a Copy -- not a Paste -- so there is no security risk. It bypasses the normal browser commands for Copy, so in addition to working on any Web browser, it also eliminates the annoying and unnecessary warning message IE 7 gives when you do a Copy.
Using the technique means I have to program it into a web page, so it's not like I can wave a wand and it will work everywhere on Lottery Post. I have to program the feature into a page just like I would program any other feature.
I will try to program it wherever it makes sense. As I mentioned in a earlier post, I finished programming it in Lucky's Follower's System, Deflate 3, Deflate 4, and all the PermaLink pop-ups in all the forums. I will eventually add it to Inspector 3, Inspector 4, and possibly the Rich Text Editor. (For the editor, Paste is much more important than Copy, so implementing the new Copy is not as helpful to the editor as it is to the lottery systems.)
I don't think there is a similar technique for Paste, but that's a good thing. If I were able to do an automated Paste, I could potentially view the contents of your clipboard, and although I would personally never do that, lots of bad webmasters would.
