Intent to Experiment: Clipboardchange event

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Rohan Raja

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Jul 14, 2025, 1:24:44 PMJul 14
to blin...@chromium.org, Rakesh Goulikar


Contact emails
Explainer
Specification
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 keep their clipboards synchronized with the system clipboard. It provides an efficient alternative to polling the clipboard(using Javascript) for changes.

Blink component
Search tags
TAG review
TAG review status
Issues addressed

Origin Trial documentation link
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


Goals for experimentation

- Primary Objective: Validate the clipboardchange event API design and developer adoption patterns in real-world web applications before standardization.

 

- Track clipboardchange event API developer engagement metrics and growth trajectories through the counters implemented.

 

- API Ergonomics Validation: Test whether the event interface and focus requirements work intuitively for developers

 

- Developer Adoption Patterns: Understand how developers integrate the API into existing workflows through the community feedback.

 

Experiment risks

None:

- There are no data storage implications with this event.

 

- This is a non-critical functionality since this is an enhancement and not a major dependency. All current clipboard workflows continue to function without the event.




Ongoing technical constraints
None


Debuggability
None


Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, ChromeOS, Android, and Android WebView)?
Yes

Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests?
Yes
wpt.fyi/results/clipboard-apis/async-navigator-clipboard-change-event.tentative.https.html
(Note - Some tests are failing on wpt.fyi infra due to flakiness which is being looked into, it runs fine in Chromium CQ runs. Test failures in Edge are probably due to the feature flag being disabled in the test environment) 

Flag name on about://flags
None

Finch feature name
ClipboardChangeEvent

Requires code in //chrome?
False

Tracking bug
Estimated milestones
Shipping on desktop
142
Origin trial desktop first
140
Origin trial desktop last
142
Shipping on Android
142
Origin trial Android first
140
Origin trial Android last
142
Origin trial WebView first
140
Origin trial WebView last
142


Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status
Links to previous Intent discussions
This intent message was generated by Chrome Platform Status.
    


Alex Russell

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Jul 14, 2025, 2:20:58 PMJul 14
to blink-dev, Rohan Raja, Rakesh Goulikar
LGTM1; are there engaged partners that you're expecting to get feedback from? And is there any chance you'll come back with an I2S before the close of the OT?

Thanks,

Alex

Rohan Raja

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Jul 14, 2025, 2:34:33 PMJul 14
to Alex Russell, blink-dev, Rakesh Goulikar


Thanks Alex for reviewing.

We are expecting feedback from Chrome remote desktop application, Excel online and Citrix's web based solutions for their remote desktop application (as per their feedback here). We might expect more engagement from similar web based rich text/image editors and remote desktop applications.

If the feedback is positive for the API and if we see good adoption, then we might propose I2S before the close of the OT.

-Rohan


From: Alex Russell <sligh...@chromium.org>
Sent: Monday, July 14, 2025 11:50 PM
To: blink-dev <blin...@chromium.org>
Cc: Rohan Raja <ror...@microsoft.com>; Rakesh Goulikar <rakesh....@microsoft.com>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: Intent to Experiment: Clipboardchange event
 
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