⚓ T341281 Incorrect handling of URL copied from Microsoft Edge address bar

⚓ T341281 Incorrect handling of URL copied from Microsoft Edge address bar
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T341281
Incorrect handling of URL copied from Microsoft Edge address bar
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BUG REPORT
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Assigned To
matmarex
Authored By
Bugreporter
Jul 6 2023, 7:10 PM
2023-07-06 19:10:40 (UTC+0)
Tags
VisualEditor-MediaWiki-2017WikitextEditor
(Backlog)
Browser-Support-Microsoft-Edge
VisualEditor
(To Triage)
Editing-team (Kanban Board)
MW-1.45-notes (1.45.0-wmf.6; 2025-06-17)
Verified
MW-1.46-notes (1.46.0-wmf.5; 2025-12-02)
Essential-Work
Referenced Files
F70688508: image.png
Nov 27 2025, 3:33 PM
2025-11-27 15:33:00 (UTC+0)
F70688503: image.png
Nov 27 2025, 3:33 PM
2025-11-27 15:33:00 (UTC+0)
Subscribers
Aklapper
Bewfip
Bugreporter
DLynch
matmarex
Nardog
Description
Steps to replicate the issue
(include links if applicable):
Use Windows 10 or 11, Edge 114
Open Microsoft Edge and browse any web page (e.g.
Enable 2017 Wikitext editor
Edit any page using 2017 Wikitext editor (e.g. browse
in either Edge or Firefox)
Copy the URL from the address bar of Edge
Paste it into the 2017 Wikitext editor
Alternative replication:
View
Click any message field ("Reply to xxx" or "Post a new message to xxx"), and switch to source mode (title field does not have such issue)
Paste the URL copied from Edge address bar into message field
What happens?
The title of the web page "Example Domain" (without hyperlink) is pasted
What should have happened instead?
The URL "
is pasted
Software version
(skip for WMF-hosted wikis like Wikipedia):
Other information
(browser name/version, screenshots, etc.):
Note: such problem does not exist in Firefox or Chrome address bar
Details
Related Changes in Gerrit:
Subject
Repo
Branch
Lines +/-
Paste URLs from Microsoft Edge address bar as plain text in source mode
mediawiki/extensions/VisualEditor
master
+120
-1
Update VE core submodule to master (eca5d859a)
mediawiki/extensions/VisualEditor
master
+1
-1
tests: ClipboardHandler: Allow testing formats other than text/html and text/plain
VisualEditor/VisualEditor
master
+9
-2
Update VE core submodule to master (91ba9e148)
mediawiki/extensions/VisualEditor
master
+1
-1
Support pasting URLs from Microsoft Edge address bar
VisualEditor/VisualEditor
master
+39
-0
Customize query in gerrit
Related Objects
Mentions
Mentioned In
T410969: VisualEditor breaks external links with query string when transforming to interwiki links
Mentioned Here
T129546: Support preserving external links in pasted HTML content
Event Timeline
Bugreporter
created this task.
Jul 6 2023, 7:10 PM
2023-07-06 19:10:40 (UTC+0)
Restricted Application
added a project:
Growth-Team
View Herald Transcript
Jul 6 2023, 7:10 PM
2023-07-06 19:10:41 (UTC+0)
Restricted Application
added a subscriber:
Aklapper
View Herald Transcript
matmarex
subscribed.
Edited
Jul 6 2023, 7:17 PM
2023-07-06 19:17:05 (UTC+0)
Comment Actions
It's because Edge tries to be cute and copies the link as rich text (i.e. "
Example Domain
"), and VisualEditor rejects external links in pasted text, except on a few wikis configured otherwise (
T129546
).
Bugreporter
added a comment.
Jul 6 2023, 7:18 PM
2023-07-06 19:18:41 (UTC+0)
Comment Actions
Note there are no problem when pasting to normal WikiEditor.
Maintenance_bot
added a project:
VisualEditor
Jul 6 2023, 7:30 PM
2023-07-06 19:30:24 (UTC+0)
DLynch
subscribed.
Jul 6 2023, 8:04 PM
2023-07-06 20:04:45 (UTC+0)
Comment Actions
@Bugreporter
Yeah, it's because pasting into a plain textarea doesn't allow it to try pasting the rich-text variants.
Anyway, doesn't just apply to 2017 Wikitext Editor -- pasting it into VE also pastes the title of the page.
Having looked at it in Edge, in the clipboard event's data there's
text/html
text/plain
(empty string), and
text/link-preview
(JSON string with a perhaps-helpful
url
key). The existence of that last one seems like something we could easily special-case sniffing for and extracting the value from, if we want to...
Urbanecm_WMF
moved this task from
Inbox
to
Triaged
on the
Growth-Team
board.
Jul 12 2023, 8:19 AM
2023-07-12 08:19:41 (UTC+0)
Pppery
removed projects:
Growth-Team
StructuredDiscussions
Oct 14 2024, 5:29 PM
2024-10-14 17:29:53 (UTC+0)
matmarex
added a comment.
May 5 2025, 6:29 PM
2025-05-05 18:29:20 (UTC+0)
Comment Actions
This was reported on-wiki twice recently:
Nardog
subscribed.
May 6 2025, 5:38 AM
2025-05-06 05:38:19 (UTC+0)
gerritbot
added a comment.
May 7 2025, 10:12 PM
2025-05-07 22:12:59 (UTC+0)
Comment Actions
Change #1143196 had a related patch set uploaded (by Bartosz Dziewoński; author: Bartosz Dziewoński):
[VisualEditor/VisualEditor@master] Support pasting URLs from Microsoft Edge address bar
gerritbot
added a project:
Patch-For-Review
May 7 2025, 10:13 PM
2025-05-07 22:13:02 (UTC+0)
gerritbot
added a comment.
Jun 10 2025, 12:56 AM
2025-06-10 00:56:15 (UTC+0)
Comment Actions
Change #1143196
merged
by jenkins-bot:
[VisualEditor/VisualEditor@master] Support pasting URLs from Microsoft Edge address bar
gerritbot
added a comment.
Jun 10 2025, 1:29 AM
2025-06-10 01:29:01 (UTC+0)
Comment Actions
Change #1154911 had a related patch set uploaded (by Bartosz Dziewoński; author: Bartosz Dziewoński):
[mediawiki/extensions/VisualEditor@master] Update VE core submodule to master (91ba9e148)
gerritbot
added a comment.
Jun 10 2025, 1:49 AM
2025-06-10 01:49:38 (UTC+0)
Comment Actions
Change #1154911
merged
by jenkins-bot:
[mediawiki/extensions/VisualEditor@master] Update VE core submodule to master (91ba9e148)
DLynch
assigned this task to
matmarex
Jun 10 2025, 1:50 AM
2025-06-10 01:50:40 (UTC+0)
DLynch
added projects:
Editing-team (Kanban Board)
Editing QA
DLynch
moved this task from
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to
QA
on the
Editing-team (Kanban Board)
board.
ReleaseTaggerBot
added a project:
MW-1.45-notes (1.45.0-wmf.6; 2025-06-17)
Jun 10 2025, 2:00 AM
2025-06-10 02:00:17 (UTC+0)
Maintenance_bot
removed a project:
Patch-For-Review
Jun 10 2025, 2:30 AM
2025-06-10 02:30:21 (UTC+0)
Ryasmeen
edited projects, added
Verified
; removed
Editing QA
Jun 14 2025, 12:08 AM
2025-06-14 00:08:27 (UTC+0)
Ryasmeen
moved this task from
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Ready for Sign Off
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board.
ppelberg
closed this task as
Resolved
Aug 18 2025, 4:34 PM
2025-08-18 16:34:52 (UTC+0)
Bugreporter
reopened this task as
Open
Nov 21 2025, 12:01 PM
2025-11-21 12:01:34 (UTC+0)
Comment Actions
Reopen. It seems broken again.
Copy an external URL from Edge 142 address bar to DiscussionTools in Edge 142 will pastes
[https://example.com/ Example Domain]
Copy an external URL from Edge 142 address bar to DiscussionTools in Firefox 145 will pastes
Example Domain
Copy an Wikimedia URL from Edge 142 address bar to DiscussionTools in Edge 142 will pastes
[[metawiki:Main_Page|Main Page - Meta-Wiki]]
Copy an Wikimedia URL from Edge 142 address bar to DiscussionTools in Firefox 145 will pastes
Main Page - Meta-Wiki
None of behaviors are intended.
Bewfip
subscribed.
Edited
Nov 24 2025, 11:38 PM
2025-11-24 23:38:00 (UTC+0)
Comment Actions
The behaviour inside Edge should be working as intended (gerrit #1143196 parses the url and title). Inter-browser pasting to Firefox probably needs some investigation on the format. I suppose Edge's MIME type
text/link-preview
is lost, so the link is treated as normal HTML and dropped.
Bewfip
mentioned this in
T410969: VisualEditor breaks external links with query string when transforming to interwiki links
Nov 25 2025, 12:17 AM
2025-11-25 00:17:36 (UTC+0)
Bugreporter
added a comment.
Nov 25 2025, 2:27 AM
2025-11-25 02:27:43 (UTC+0)
Comment Actions
The behaviour inside Edge should be working as intended (gerrit #1143196 parses the url and title)
But (1) this is still different from how we handle copying URL from address bars in other browser. (2) This transforms Wikimedia internal URLs to internal links (see example 3) which is not explicitly ask for (remember we are editing source code and I expect none of transforms should be performed in copy-paste).
matmarex
added a comment.
Nov 27 2025, 3:33 PM
2025-11-27 15:33:00 (UTC+0)
Comment Actions
In
T341281#11395508
@Bugreporter
wrote:
Copy an external URL from Edge 142 address bar to DiscussionTools in Edge 142 will pastes
[https://example.com/ Example Domain]
Copy an Wikimedia URL from Edge 142 address bar to DiscussionTools in Edge 142 will pastes
[[metawiki:Main_Page|Main Page - Meta-Wiki]]
In
T341281#11403541
@Bewfip
wrote:
The behaviour inside Edge should be working as intended (gerrit #1143196 parses the url and title).
In
T341281#11403901
@Bugreporter
wrote:
But (1) this is still different from how we handle copying URL from address bars in other browser. (2) This transforms Wikimedia internal URLs to internal links (see example 3) which is not explicitly ask for (remember we are editing source code and I expect none of transforms should be performed in copy-paste).
I agree with
@Bewfip
that this is the expected behavior in visual mode. Yes, it is different from other browsers, but this is how Edge wants copy-pasting from the address bar to work. If you copy paste from the Edge address bar into Microsoft Word or Google Docs or something, it will also paste in the same format. If you don't like this behavior, I found a setting in Edge to disable it:
Settings
Appearance
Browser behavior and features
Change URL copy and paste format
Plain text
In source mode, though, I agree with
@Bugreporter
that this is weird. We should probably paste just the plain link. There is some precedent for this: when pasting a URL pointing to a page on the same wiki, in visual mode we generate a nice internal link, but in source mode we paste the URL as-is.
I'll propose another patch for this.
In
T341281#11395508
@Bugreporter
wrote:
Copy an external URL from Edge 142 address bar to DiscussionTools in Firefox 145 will pastes
Example Domain
Copy an Wikimedia URL from Edge 142 address bar to DiscussionTools in Firefox 145 will pastes
Main Page - Meta-Wiki
In
T341281#11403541
@Bewfip
wrote:
Inter-browser pasting to Firefox probably needs some investigation on the format. I suppose Edge's MIME type
text/link-preview
is lost, so the link is treated as normal HTML and dropped.
Firefox doesn't seem to expose this format in the clipboard that it makes available to VisualEditor or other websites (you can also test this on e.g.
). Maybe you could file a feature request upstream.
That said, I can't reproduce this problem: it pastes an external/internal link for me. I don't know why you get a different behavior, but I don't think we can do anything about this, and I don't think it's a practical use case anyway.
For what it's worth, here's what I see on
when I copy from the Edge address bar into the page with Ctrl+V, using Edge:
…and using Firefox:
Bugreporter
added a comment.
Edited
Nov 27 2025, 3:57 PM
2025-11-27 15:57:58 (UTC+0)
Comment Actions
Edge-to-Firefox copying exposes two items in clipboard inspector, one is text/plain for URL, another is text/html, whose content is:


yyy



This is a Windows-specific clipboard format.
Bewfip
added a comment.
Edited
Nov 27 2025, 4:07 PM
2025-11-27 16:07:14 (UTC+0)
Comment Actions
The MIME type
text/link-preview
seems to be supported only by MS Edge, and is lost when copying from Edge to Chrome or Firefox (though that json is viewable with the InsideClipboard util, registered as "Link Preview Format").
I consider it unlikely that other browsers will support this format. It is not registered with IANA, and does not have a published specification. On the other hand, the
CF_HTML
sample shown in the previous comment is documented:
gerritbot
added a comment.
Nov 27 2025, 4:33 PM
2025-11-27 16:33:44 (UTC+0)
Comment Actions
Change #1212188 had a related patch set uploaded (by Bartosz Dziewoński; author: Bartosz Dziewoński):
[VisualEditor/VisualEditor@master] tests: ClipboardHandler: Allow testing formats other than text/html and text/plain
gerritbot
added a project:
Patch-For-Review
Nov 27 2025, 4:33 PM
2025-11-27 16:33:45 (UTC+0)
Comment Actions
Change #1212189 had a related patch set uploaded (by Bartosz Dziewoński; author: Bartosz Dziewoński):
[mediawiki/extensions/VisualEditor@master] Paste URLs from Microsoft Edge address bar as plain text in source mode
gerritbot
added a comment.
Dec 1 2025, 10:45 AM
2025-12-01 10:45:22 (UTC+0)
Comment Actions
Change #1212188
merged
by jenkins-bot:
[VisualEditor/VisualEditor@master] tests: ClipboardHandler: Allow testing formats other than text/html and text/plain
gerritbot
added a comment.
Dec 1 2025, 11:46 AM
2025-12-01 11:46:33 (UTC+0)
Comment Actions
Change #1213434 had a related patch set uploaded (by Bartosz Dziewoński; author: Bartosz Dziewoński):
[mediawiki/extensions/VisualEditor@master] Update VE core submodule to master (eca5d859a)
gerritbot
added a comment.
Dec 1 2025, 12:26 PM
2025-12-01 12:26:40 (UTC+0)
Comment Actions
Change #1213434
merged
by jenkins-bot:
[mediawiki/extensions/VisualEditor@master] Update VE core submodule to master (eca5d859a)
gerritbot
added a comment.
Dec 1 2025, 7:39 PM
2025-12-01 19:39:33 (UTC+0)
Comment Actions
Change #1212189
merged
by jenkins-bot:
[mediawiki/extensions/VisualEditor@master] Paste URLs from Microsoft Edge address bar as plain text in source mode
matmarex
closed this task as
Resolved
Dec 1 2025, 7:46 PM
2025-12-01 19:46:34 (UTC+0)
Comment Actions
The behavior in source mode should be okay now as well.
ReleaseTaggerBot
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Dec 1 2025, 8:00 PM
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removed a project:
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Dec 1 2025, 8:32 PM
2025-12-01 20:32:19 (UTC+0)
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2025-12-08 22:56:07 (UTC+0)
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