this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
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Some projects keep surprising me with their “solutions,” and this is one of those cases. A proposal under review by developers from GNOME and Mozilla could change how middle-mouse-button paste behaves on Linux and other Unix-like systems.

The discussions, visible in Mozilla’s Phabricator revision D277804 and a linked GNOME gsettings-desktop-schemas merge request, focus on disabling the traditional primary selection paste by default.

Mozilla proposes changing the default behavior of the Firefox browser on Unix builds so that pressing the middle mouse button no longer pastes text by default. The author of the revision frames the current behavior as a source of confusion and accidental pastes, especially when users press the middle button without expecting the clipboard contents to be inserted into text fields.

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[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 7 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Yes, let's keep taking features away. 🙄

This is actually an accessibility issue. It's often much easier for me to use middle click paste than other copy and paste methods. But as always those numbnuts just think about streamlining everything.

[–] priapus@piefed.social 14 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Making a feature optional is not taking it away

[–] Scrollone@feddit.it 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

But if it off by default, it's going to slowly rot and then they'll just remove it altogether.

[–] priapus@piefed.social 2 points 3 days ago

GNOME has plenty of features that are off by default and still exist. The merge request also mentions that redhat would 100% recieve complaints from paying customers if it was removed. Theyre very clearly aware that people still want this feature. You're just assuming the worst.

[–] Hawke@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago

It is, but slower.

[–] Durandal@lemmy.today 10 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

There should be real hotkey editing in the settings or it should respect the OS hotkey settings. As of now the only way to toggle this is by diving into about config and finding the flag.

Would solve other problems too, like ctrl+pgup/down swapping tabs, but it also is used for things like changing spreadsheet tabs.