John Gruber of Daring Fireball noticed an issue where the Copy menu item in Safari remained enabled even when no text was selected on a webpage. Jeff Johnson confirmed this bug, which originates in WebKit, the rendering engine used by Safari. The problem also affects other applications like Mail, as well as RSS readers such as NetNewsWire and Vienna, which utilize WebKit. When there's no selection in a WebKit view, copying results in nothing useful being pasted, and it overwrites the existing clipboard content. Traditionally, macOS applications disable the Copy and Cut menu items when nothing is selected. Invoking a disabled keyboard shortcut for Copy produces an alert sound to indicate the action's unavailability. However, since early 2025, WebKit-based apps allow copying of empty or unusable data if nothing is selected. This behavior is considered a bug as it can erase valuable clipboard history without offering any functionality. Johnson reported this issue to WebKit's Bugzilla, but it was incorrectly closed as "Won't Fix." The WebKit team conflated the application-level Copy command behavior with JavaScript's document.execCommand("copy") functionality. The bug was introduced when WebKit engineers attempted to fix a long-standing JavaScript bug related to copying. Johnson hopes the WebKit team will re-examine the previously submitted bug report, especially given their recent encouragement for bug submissions.