Good news, we're getting there. In Chrome 43 and (probably) Firefox it's supported: http://caniuse.com/#search=clipb (see note 3)

However the API is god awful.

> However the API is god awful.

To be fair, it's basically a proprietary IE5 API that's now been standardised (like quite a few others).

Isn't this like a huge security risk?

Why? Copy FROM clipboard would be, sure. Copy TO clipboard... OK, I can come up with scenarios where it'd be a problem, but they're pretty far-fetched.

Well there are attacks in the vein of this: https://thejh.net/misc/website-terminal-copy-paste

Run a timer overwriting your clipboard every 10ms. Prevent you from copying anything off a webpage and instead replacing it with a copyright notice. Etc., etc., etc.

Flash has offered these same clipboard APIs for years and these clipboard "attacks" have never been a problem before. I don't see how replacing Flash clipboard APIs with HTML clipboard APIs will change web developers' behavior.

There's a permission prompt for first use and I think Mozilla considers making it https only.

Is that why I keep getting notifications that github wants to use flash player? Good to know.