Open Bug 1588140 Opened 5 years ago Updated 3 years ago

[New Certificate] The user can't select multiple rows from the about:certificate page content

Categories

(Firefox :: Security, defect, P2)

71 Branch
Desktop
All
defect

Tracking

()

Tracking Status
firefox71 --- affected

People

(Reporter: cbaica, Unassigned)

References

(Depends on 1 open bug, Blocks 2 open bugs)

Details

Affected platforms

  • Windows 10
  • Ubuntu 18.04
  • macOS 10.14

Steps to reproduce

  1. Launch Firefox.
  2. Navigate to any website and view the websites certificate.
  3. Using the mouse select multiple rows of information.

Expected result

  • The user can select the wanted information without issues.

Actual result

  • Only one row of information can be selected at a time.

Regression range

  • This is not a regression.
Blocks: cert-viewer
Priority: -- → P3

Anne, it seems like selecting text across web components isn't trivial to implement. Do you know more about this and who we could turn to for help?

Flags: needinfo?(annevk)
Flags: needinfo?(annevk) → needinfo?(mbrodesser)

:johannh: there's bug 1590379 to support Selection across the Shadow DOM boundary, which I guess is what's needed here. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I have ideas how to implement that and am working on them, but the required changes are complex. Do you have specific questions?

Flags: needinfo?(mbrodesser) → needinfo?(jhofmann)

Nope, I think we were mainly looking for a bug to block this on. Thanks :)

Depends on: 1590379
Flags: needinfo?(jhofmann)

Usecase from https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/enterprise/2020-October/002558.html:

In particular, I used to be able to select and copy the SAN entries, which
is rather useful when managing certificates with our provider. Now I
can only select a single line at a time which is rather useless when
handling a cert with 75+ SAN records.

Yeah, hm, that is really unfortunate and we were not aware of this limitation of shadow dom/web components when we chose to use it. I tend to think that good copy-paste support is important enough for this viewer that we might have made a different choice otherwise.

I can see two ways to help with this (unless we want to wait for proper cross-component selection support):

  • Add “copy to clipboard” buttons for sections and certificates. This is probably a good idea anyway and could help in the short term.
  • Rewrite the thing to avoid using shadow dom. To be quite honest I don’t think it has given us any benefits, only weird encapsulation issues. This is a bit bigger project maybe? I definitely want to keep it mostly plain JS and avoid introducing another library.

I’ll try to get the buttons thing prioritized...

Severity: normal → S3
Priority: P3 → P2

Hi, I was just about to report this UX bug but I found the already open issue. I see it's been a couple of years, and there is still no simple way to select multiple rows for copying and pasting. Consider the Subject Alt Names field, which can contain hundreds of entries.

I agree that a "copy to clipboard" button for each section would be great. Also, why Web Components for a seemingly simple tabular text data page??

You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.