Intent to Prototype: Clipboardchange event

[Chromestatus]

Contact emails

ror...@microsoft.com, rago...@microsoft.com, sa...@microsoft.com, lukek...@google.com

Explainer

https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/ClipboardAPI/clipboard-change-event-explainer.md

Specification

https://www.w3.org/TR/clipboard-apis/#clipboard-event-clipboardchange

Summary

The "clipboardchange" event fires whenever the system clipboard contents are changed either by a web app or any other system application. This allows web-apps like remote desktop clients to stay in sync with the system clipboard. It provides an efficient alternative to polling the clipboard for changes.

Blink component

Blink>DataTransfer

Motivation

Today, a web-app can monitor the system clipboard by polling and reading the clipboard through async clipboard API at regular intervals. However, polling is not efficient and this feature aims to introduce an efficient way of notifying web apps when clipboard changes.

Initial public proposal

https://github.com/WICG/proposals/issues/186

Search tags

clipboard change event, clipboardchange, clipboard monitor

TAG review

https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/1017

TAG review status

Pending

Risks

Interoperability and Compatibility

None

Gecko: No signal (https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1115)

WebKit: No signal (https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/429)

Web developers: Positive Web based spreadsheet apps like Excel Online and web based remote desktop client apps have shown interest in this API. Please refer to the explainer document for further details about their use cases.

Other signals:

WebView application risks

Does this intent deprecate or change behavior of existing APIs, such that it has potentially high risk for Android WebView-based applications?

None

Debuggability

None

Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests?

No

Flag name on about://flags

None

Finch feature name

ClipboardChangeEvent

Requires code in //chrome?

False

Tracking bug

https://issues.chromium.org/issues/41442253

Estimated milestones

No milestones specified

Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status

https://chromestatus.com/feature/5085102657503232?gate=5071621023596544

This intent message was generated by Chrome Platform Status.

[Rick Byers]

Looks great, a clear improvement over polling. Thanks!

Hopefully you can find APIs on non-Windows platforms to enable this. The explainer mentions polling the clipboard on MacOS but I'm not sure we'd want to do that in Chromium, would we? Perhaps it would be better to not expose the API on platforms that lack support and rely on the site doing feature detection to decide if it wants to poll and at what interval?

Rick

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[Rick Byers]

Sounds great Rohan, thank you! 

On Thu, Nov 28, 2024 at 5:43 AM Rohan Raja <ror...@microsoft.com> wrote:

Thanks Rick for reviewing this proposal. I agree that introducing clipboard polling to Chromium might introduce technical debt and performance concerns, that is why we don't want to involve the platform for the initial prototype. We are contemplating on raising a request to MacOS team for providing an official API or an efficient method to detect clipboard changes. It also makes sense to leave it for the web authors to use polling for Mac and not provide clipboardchange event feature on Mac (web authors can also check platform using navigator.userAgentData.platform API). We would like to defer the final decision after the first prototype which will work in Windows / Linux since we can start getting early user feedback from those platforms.

-Rohan

---

From: Rick Byers <rby...@chromium.org>
Sent: Wednesday, November 27, 2024 9:25 PM
To: Chromestatus <ad...@cr-status.appspotmail.com>
Cc: blin...@chromium.org <blin...@chromium.org>; lukek...@google.com <lukek...@google.com>; Rakesh Goulikar <rakesh....@microsoft.com>; Rohan Raja <ror...@microsoft.com>; Sanket Joshi (EDGE) <sa...@microsoft.com>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [blink-dev] Intent to Prototype: Clipboardchange event

 

You don't often get email from rby...@chromium.org. Learn why this is important

[Rohan Raja]

Thanks Rick for reviewing this proposal. I agree that introducing clipboard polling to Chromium might introduce technical debt and performance concerns, that is why we don't want to involve the platform for the initial prototype. We are contemplating on raising a request to MacOS team for providing an official API or an efficient method to detect clipboard changes. It also makes sense to leave it for the web authors to use polling for Mac and not provide clipboardchange event feature on Mac (web authors can also check platform using navigator.userAgentData.platform API). We would like to defer the final decision after the first prototype which will work in Windows / Linux since we can start getting early user feedback from those platforms.

-Rohan

---

From: Rick Byers <rby...@chromium.org>
Sent: Wednesday, November 27, 2024 9:25 PM
To: Chromestatus <ad...@cr-status.appspotmail.com>
Cc: blin...@chromium.org <blin...@chromium.org>; lukek...@google.com <lukek...@google.com>; Rakesh Goulikar <rakesh....@microsoft.com>; Rohan Raja <ror...@microsoft.com>; Sanket Joshi (EDGE) <sa...@microsoft.com>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [blink-dev] Intent to Prototype: Clipboardchange event

 

You don't often get email from rby...@chromium.org. Learn why this is important