14 DAY TRIAL // It's something that so many people stumble upon so often it's a wonder that browser makers, at least some, haven't gotten around to implementing a simple way of copying and pasting text without formatting.
Google Chrome recently introduced the CTRL+SHIFT+V shortcut which pastes any text without formatting into any text field or in Google Docs for that matter.
It would be great to have the same option in Firefox, but we have the next best thing, plenty of extensions to choose from. Now, the choice is rather wide, but one extension that has proved reliable and is simple to use is Copy Plain Text.
As the name implies, it's a Firefox add-on that enables you to copy text without formatting and then paste it where ever you need, in Firefox or in a text editor like Microsoft Word, OpenOffice or LibreOffice Writer and so on.
The add-on is available in the Mozilla Add-ons repository, but it's an older version, Copy Plain Text 0.3.3, which is no longer maintained and, unfortunately, doesn't work with Firefox 7 or newer versions.
However, you can grab Copy Plain Text 0.3.5, a newer version that does work with Firefox 7, as well as Firefox 8 and Firefox 9, from right here on Softpedia.
But that won't be enough, Copy Plain Text 0.3.5 works with all newer Firefox versions, but Firefox will still report it as incompatible. One way of getting around this is to install the Add-on Compatibility Reporter extension from Mozilla.
So, here's what you need to do:
1. install Add-on Compatibility Reporter from here then restart Firefox; 2. install Copy Plain Text 0.3.5 from here and then restart Firefox again; 3. enjoy.
One of the great things about this add-on is its simplicity, however, there are a couple of options you may want to check out. For starters, if you're going to use it a lot, you can set it as the "default Copy action" in Firefox. You can also play around with the options to trim or remove empty spaces and lines if you sometimes get weird results.