How I wish I’d found this extension earlier! Often I need to copy text directly from my browser into another document or other web page.  But most of the time the automatic copy picks up all the HTML formatting code along with the text.  That’s fine if I really want the formatting along for the ride, but more often I need to purge the markup code before I paste the text content into my next application. The only certain way I knew of to do this was by pasting my content into a plain text editor, recopying, and pasting to the final location. But if you use Firefox or Internet Explorer to do your browsing, there’s a really cool extension called Extended Copy Menu 1.6 that adds copying options to your right-click menu.

Here’s how it works. Navigate to a page you want and select images/text. Then right-click on the selection.

Instead of just the default “Copy” option, you’ve also got “Copy as Plain Text” and “Copy as HTML”. Now you can paste exactly what you want from your clipboard into the next application. Thanks to Lifehacker for the tip.

Note:  It seems this extension only works with Firefox versions 3.5 and below. Not sure if this will be updated for version 3.6, the newest Firefox release.

Update (02-03-2010) :  This extension has now been updated to work with FireFox 3.6. There’s also a version for Internet Explorer, but I haven’t used or tested it. Have you? Let me know what you think in the comments.