How to Re-Enable Copy & Paste on Annoying Sites That Block It

Copy and paste keyboard shortcuts are beautiful gifts from the gods, and any website that blocks such an offering can burn in hell. But really, Cmd+C and Cmd+V (Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V for Windows folks) are second nature to most of us, so it's very frustrating when sites like PayPal don't let us use them.

Thankfully, if you're a Firefox user, you can permanently enable copy/paste and never have to deal with this inconvenience again.

Why Block Copy & Paste Anyway?

For security purposes, many financial and banking sites block your ability to copy/paste. For example, when I change my password on PayPal and try to paste my new password into the "re-enter" box, PayPal flashes a warning saying, "Please retype your password. Don't copy and paste it."

Cool, I get it. PayPal wants us to be absolutely positive we know our password. However, if you're creating strong unbreakable passwords or entering long strings of numbers, it can get really annoying—really fast.

Step 1: Access Firefox's "About:Config" Feature

There are a number of "secret" Firefox application settings that aren't available to you under Options or Preferences. Although they're held in the prefs.js and user.js files of Firefox's package contents, you can easily view them on your browser by typing about:config into the address bar.

Since modifying these advanced configuration settings could potentially jack up your browser, Firefox flashes a little warning asking you to promise to be careful. Just proceed—I know what I'm doing.

Step 2: Find the Clipboard Preference

When you first enter the about:config settings, you'll notice a list of hundreds of preferences.

Don't risk messing anything up and go straight to the target by searching for dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled in the preferences search bar.

Step 3: Turn the Value to FALSE

Once you've located dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled, simply double-click it and you will see its value change from "true" to "false."

By making this value false, you are essentially disabling an enabled line of code that allows sites to mess with your clipboard and block the copy/paste functionality.

Thats All! Now Copy/Paste Away!

As long as that value remains "false," you should never have any issue copying and pasting long passwords, addresses, account numbers, or anything else that we all hate typing out.

You can even use this to copy/paste quotes from some our your favorite blogs and news sites that block you from doing so.

Cover image via Shutterstock