One of my frustrations with Internet Explorer is that it won’t just let me paste text from the clipboard without it asking me if I want it to.

It’s a security feature, and the inconvenience means that it is probably doing its job.

I found instructions to turn on clipboard access but didn’t really want it to apply to every single website, just in case I happen upon a hacked site.

The answer is to use the Zones in Internet Explorer to turn on clipboard access for my Trusted Zone and to make sure that the site I need is in that zone.

Start Internet Explorer and go to the webpage you want to give access to the clipboard. Click on the Tools icon and then Internet Options. Click on the Security tab and then on the green tick icon. Click on the Sites button below this section. The current website should automatically be added to the top text box so click on Add to include it in the Trusted Zone. You may need to click in the box labelled ‘Require server verification (https:) for all sites in this zone’ so that the tick disappears. Click on Close when the site has been added to the bottom box.

Now click on the Custom level button towards the bottom of the Internet Options window. Scroll down to the option ‘Allow Programmatic clipboard access’ option in the Scripting section, which is towards the bottom of the list. Click on the option Enable and then on OK.

If you want to check that this setting has not been changed for the normal Internet zone, click on its icon and then on the Custom level button. Find the clipboard option again and check that it is set to Prompt.

In fairness this is true of Firefox as well. In fact, Firefox is somewhat less helpful when it comes to changing the settings. Rather than the settings window like Internet Explorer, you have to go to the about@config page, promise to be careful, create a new value called signed.applets.codebase_principal_support and then set it to true. It’s not all pasting but only when Javascript is being used by the website.