People that work with text in a browser know this very well, it's a pain to get rid of formatting. Copy anything from any website and you'll grab the font, font size, color, links and everything else, the full HTML data. That's great if that's what you want, but sometimes you just want the plain text.

Document editors have handled this with the paste special option, usually activated by hitting ctrl+shift+v instead of the usual ctrl+v. Almost two years ago, the Chrome developers implemented paste special, i.e. paste as plain text. That would be in Chrome 7.

Firefox users were out of luck and had to resort to all sorts of extensions, which didn't always work right or weren't even supported anymore.

Thankfully, that's no longer the case. Sometime in the last few weeks, or maybe more it's hard to verify, Mozilla added the paste special functionality in Firefox. It's not even listed in the official documentation.

There's not much to say about it, just hit CTRL+SHIFT+V and marvel at the simplicity. What's more, in some cases it works better than the Chrome implementation. Specifically, it handles new rows better, it converts them to <br />. Chrome on the other hands adds a <div> for each row and a "".