NOTE: This bug is not about the oncopy/oncut/onpaste events, just the onbefore* variants. Our current implementation for the onbeforecopy/onbeforecut/onbeforepaste events is pretty wonky. The currently open bugs are bug 415921, bug 410858, bug 415938, bug 394818, bug 414689. Some of those are really bad and potentially a security risk. We're also lacking real use cases, see bug 280959 around comment 100 and on. I say we just remove it for this release, there's simply too much work remaining to get them into a good enough state to ship, and too little value to make it worth it. Again, oncopy/oncut/onpaste are fine and should be left as is.

Smaug: would you have the cycles for this? Would be great to get fixed for beta4 since it'll affect websites (i.e. we don't want them to start using these events)

Do we want remove the code or just disable it? ...just compiling the disable-the-code patch.

I think disabling the code could be ok. That way we remember that there are those before* events and that we don't support those ATM.

I say we should simply remove it given that there doesn't seem to be that much use for it and that we'd probably have to make some bigger changes to make it safe (i.e. it currently fires when it's not safe to run script it seems)

A lot of our doc-localizers seem to think we still have these, and I bet a bunch of developers do too. Marking late-compat and dev-doc-needed to see if we can clean that up. Is there a bug that tracks fixing the issues? This bug makes it sound like there's an implementation issue that we need to solve, but all the bugs mentioned here are marked FIXED, so it's not clear where people should watch to see when they can start using these again.

Adding Team Evang, so they can find out about this feature cut as well!

See comment 0. There were a bunch of crashers, these all got marked WFM/FIXED with the removal of the events. There were also some IE compat isses, as well as lack for real use cases, see bug 280959.

All of those bugs are FIXED or WFM, and I don't expect them to reopen when we land a better impl, so they don't work for tracking progress. Should 280959 be REOPENED, and used to track future work (and collecting use cases)?

Please don't reopen bug 280959 to track re-adding onbefore*. It's half fixed (oncut etc.) and it's a mess.

*If* someone desires the onbefore* events they can open a new bug. The use cases for those events are still unknown though.

These were removed from the English docs a while back. I take it this is dev-doc-needed because there are localizations of the docs that still include them?

I thought I saw some hits on the English docs as well, when I searched, but I was using Google rather than Nutch, so they might have been stale. If we don't use d-d-n for key localized doc issues, feel free to clear it!

Well, I went to double check and although I'd removed the docs for them, they were still mentioned on the Firefox 3 for developers page. Now they're not.