In Firefox (and I think in other modern browsers, too) if you select some text, or an image, within a browser window, you can then drag it, or, rather, an attenuated looking copy of it, around within the window. Is there any practical point to this behavior (which I have, on occasion, found to be quite annoying)? I thought, once, it might make it possible to drag the content into other programs in other windows, providing a method of doing a copy and paste without using the keyboard or menus, but experimentation soon showed me that this does not work. What, then, is the point?
It does actually work that way in some circumstances. I guess it depends on the OS and apps. On Macs, for example, most images (unless some fancy Javascript is blocking it) can be dragged into other applications. I’ve used this on many occasions to send pictures to people.
Highlight a block of text in this thread and drag it to the Quick Reply text area.
I didn’t know you could do that, here’s my contribution…
open a new tab and go to images.google.com
Go back to the first tab and drag an image up to the new tab to the browser changes to the other tab, then into the search bar. Google will now search the web for that image.
Here’s what grabbing the SD banner at the top got me.
OK. I am still not terribly convinced that this is a feature that is more useful than annoying. After all, I can achieve all that with Cntrl-C, Cntrl-V.
A lot of features in Windows have alternate ways to do them. Cutting and pasting can be done with Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-X (cut), Ctrl-Del (cut), Ctrl-Ins (paste), Right Mouse-Delete, Right Mouse-Paste etc.
I mean, I could take your statement to the extreme and just unplug my mouse. I would assume it’s still possible to navigate Windows without a mouse. They were just trying to make it easier for you to drag text from one place to another without using (one of) the cut/copy and paste functions.
Now, my problem is when I accidentally do something and drag a Firefox tab somewhere and it spawns it’s own window. Then what do you do? I don’t know how I did it and so far I haven’t figured out a why to put it back. The only thing I can to is copy the address, close the window and paste the address in a new tab. It’s not the end of the world but that’s annoying.
Also, FTR, in both these cases, when you pick something up with your mouse, or if you’ve noticed you’ve accidentally grabbed something with your mouse, push ESC before letting go. That will put it back where it belongs without dropping it in some weird place. No newly spawned windows. No text getting dropped into random spots etc.
You can drag images onto the desktop to save them. (I’ve done that accidentally before now and wonder where the hell a picture had come from!) Or drag them into an image-editing program, for instance.
Just drag the tab from the newly spawned window back to the tab bar on the original window. It should drop in where you put it and the new window will close.
Yes, you drag a tab out of the tab bar to create a new window, and drag the title bar of the window onto the tab bar to put it back.
Why annoying? It’s not like it’s going to interfere with anything else you do. If you don’t click & drag, you’ll never even know it’s there, and why else would you click & drag?
I do it by accident from time to time. Like I mentioned earlier with my Firefox window spawning issue. It’s easy to do with a laptop and a trackpad. All you have to do is move your hand over the pad and you can drag something somewhere.
But, like I said, if you can catch yourself, just hit escape before you let go.
It’s not just a web browser feature, but a standard feature in quite a few programs. It’s just that there are still some hold outs. And you have to have the feature for it to work. For example, you can’t drag text into Notepad because you can’t drag text from Notepad. You can, on the other hand,
drag text into Wordpad, because Wordpad does support text dragging.
Honestly, I think of Notepad as the main holdout for this feature.
You can also point to anything that has a link behind it, and drag that to you desktop, and it will put the link there. Later, you can click on that link on your desktop to open a browser window there.
There might be some ambiguity here. If you point to an image that has a link behind it, and drag that to your desktop, what do you get. Answer: In my system at least, you get a link.
Example: Point to “The Straight Dope” banner at top of this page; drag to desktop. You get a link to SDMB. But: Point to “Fighting Ignorance Since 1973” (which is a separate image without a link behind it), and drag that to desktop. This time, you just get a copy of the .dif on your desktop.
Note also, if you highlight something (image, text, whatever) and then right-click on it, the context menu may have some different options on it than if you right-clicked without highlighting. Windows and all the other similar mouse-and-GUI systems make a game of letting you discover all those things.
Some of this could be system-dependent. I am using old versions of Ubuntu Linux, Gnome, and Firefox.
ETA: Note also that dragging-and-dropping will sometimes MOVE something from one place to another (so, if you did it by accident, you have to figure out how to move it back), or sometimes will COPY something from one place to another. In the latter case, if you didn’t mean it, just delete it or close the window or otherwise just undo whatever it did.
Some other things you can drag around in Firefox (and probably other browsers).
– Suppose you have several sites open in one window but separate tabs. Point to the title of any tab (in the tab at the top of the window). Drag that down into the window. It will open that in a new separate window (and remove it from the window with all the tabs where it previously was).
– If you have several tabs open in one window, you can rearrange them by dragging the tab left or right and dropping it between other tabs right where you want it.
ETA: I also just dragged a block of highlighted text from this thread into a gedit window and dropped it there. That worked.
So, in direct answer to njtt’s OP: There are all kinds of things you can drag, and all kinds of places you can drop them, and various kinds of cases where that does or doesn’t do something, and cases where it might even do something useful.
Something more:
If you’re looking at a web page or something similar, everything there, or nearly so, is defined in the HTML by being enclosed in a [noparse]<whatever-tag> . . . . . </whatever-tag>[/noparse] (and these blocks of whatevers can be nested inside one another). But wait, there’s more: Every thus-marked area of displayed whatever on your screen also becomes something you can right-click on (which various menus appearing depending on what it is), and is also potentially something you can drag. The browser will let you drag just about anything, because it can’t know if such dragging is permitted or makes any sense until you try to drop it somewhere. Only then can it be determined if that kind of object can be dropped into that kind of place, and with what result.
As noted above, this whole feature of dragging and dropping is not only a browser thing; it works generally through your whole operating system and any programs running within it.
You could even drag things from one virtual machine to another, or from one place to another across a network.