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When I copy or paste in the browser often there are double spaces between words.

It seems like it happened sometime over the last 12 months. Has anyone seen this or know why this is happening?

Example: 

“He who receives an idea from me, receives  instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper  at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
- Thomas Jefferson

I copied that text from here and then pasted into another tab on Firefox. I can reproduce it when posting into a new text on Patreon or new post on Twitter.

Second example (from here): 

Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error  of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some  selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because  of their lack of visibility. This can lead to false conclusions in  several different ways. It is a form of selection bias.

When run a search and add highlighting it looks like this: enter image description here

I'm running Firefox 59 on Mac OSX.

UPDATE:
I disabled all extensions and copied text in Firefox and then pasted that into Twitter and Patreon sites. The spaces were added.
I then copied the same text while in Safari and pasted that into Twitter and Patreon. There were no extra spaces.
I then copied from Firefox and pasted into other applications no extra spaces but if copying first from Firefox and then paste into Firefox it contains extra spaces.

Below is copying first from Firefox and then second from Safari. Notice the extra spaces are added on the paste event. When pasting from Safari no extra spaces are added. It only happens in Firefox.

enter image description here

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4
  • Are you running any apps or extensions that modify your clipboard? Have you tried this on a private browsing window or a fresh setup of Firefox?
    – slhck
    Commented Apr 10, 2018 at 11:51
  • @slhck I don't have anything installed that should be doing that. I'll do some more testing.
    – 1.21 gigawatts
    Commented Apr 10, 2018 at 11:53
  • Any reason for the downvotes? Willing to edit if needed.
    – 1.21 gigawatts
    Commented May 11, 2018 at 1:42
  • 1
    I have observed the same problem cutting text from Google Keep and pasting to Twitter, with Firefox 60.0.1 on macOS 10.13.4. Seems like a Firefox bug.
    – ctrueden
    Commented May 22, 2018 at 16:42

2 Answers 2

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I shall try to copy and paste the same quote. This is copied from FireFox 5.9, but pasted into Safari:

 “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

― Thomas Jefferson

I got the same results when I pasted it into a TextEdit window.

Now I've switched to a freshly upgraded version of FireFox:

 “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

― Thomas Jefferson

There does not appear to be spurious double-spacing in my copy & paste in either browser or other apps.

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3
  • Thanks for testing this. It seems to happen in the Twitter new post window or Patreon new post content area. It seems like it has to do with the text input. I thought it had to do if a page element in a browser was a content editable but I'm guessing it may be caused by specific rich text editor or the OS.
    – 1.21 gigawatts
    Commented Apr 10, 2018 at 11:50
  • Go to about:addons in Firefox, and check through the Extensions, Themes, and Plugins, disabling each, if any, in turn to see if that helps. Also, have you tried testing in Safari, or another web browser to see if it's system-wide?
    – Nevin Williams
    Commented Apr 10, 2018 at 23:58
  • I've updated the post. All extensions were disabled. It only appears to happen when copying from Firefox to Firefox.
    – 1.21 gigawatts
    Commented May 10, 2018 at 10:38
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According to my testing it appears to be a bug in Firefox on Mac OSX.

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