Yesterday after a browser crash I suddenly lost the ability to cut and paste anything to, from and within Firefox. A little hunting told me my initialisation file, user.js, must have been corrupted and that it was – so corrupted it had disappeared completely.

The solution to not being able to cut, copy or paste in Firefox is thankfully simple. If you have a user.js file simply paste the following in to it :

user_pref(“capability.policy.policynames”, “allowclipboard”);
user_pref(“capability.policy.allowclipboard.Clipboard.cutcopy”,
“allAccess”);
user_pref(“capability.policy.allowclipboard.Clipboard.paste”, “allAccess”);

If you don’t have, or can’t find, your user.js file download the ChromEdit extension from http://cdn.mozdev.org/chromedit/, select the user.js tab and paste the above in to the box.

Of course, if you’ve found this page via Google you probably have the problem and can’t cut and paste from here so you may need the IE View (view this page in IE) extension.