Firefox: Can't drag URLs to Links bar

MoxieMomma · 14 Nov 2015

wclusa said:

Thank you for reminding me: This fix works with the current version of Firefox, at the time of writing: 41.0.2. It is something worth trying when other possible solutions have failed: firefox safemode, windows escape key, bad plug-in, etc.

Actually, the current version of Fx is 42, released on Nov 3.

PS: Posted in this forum as is near the top of the search hit list for this specific problem.

Fair enough.
I was merely pointing out that few OPs follow a forum thread for 6 years.

That is all.

Cheers,
MM

UsernameIssues · 15 Nov 2015

wclusa said:

The solution for re-enabling drag and drop in Firefox was quite simple: Ensure the "Run this program as an Administrator" check-box is unticked in the windows Firefox shortcut compatibility settings.

If you were like me, you may have previously enabled that compatibility setting to resolve issues with other Firefox addons, unknowingly disabling drag-n-drop from the desktop to firefox. With recent addon updates, I found that running in administrator mode was no longer needed.

Hope this helps a few of you with this frustrating problem.

Running Firefox as admin is dangerous. I realize that you are no longer doing that. I'm just pointing it out for others that find this thread via searches.

Also, running Firefox as admin should not impact drag/drop to the link bar (the problem in the original post). It will (as you pointed out) prevent drag/drop from desktop to Firefox due to process isolation. The desktop (which is Windows Explorer) is running at the medium integrity level. Firefox (when running as admin) is running at the high integrity level. The lower process is limited in what it can do to the higher process.

This isolation can also be seen with notepad (most any app). Normally, you can drag/drop a file from Windows Explorer into notepad. If notepad is running as admin, the drag/drop will fail.

The same can be seen with the command prompt window. I'm in the habit of dragging files from Windows Explorer and dropping them into the command prompt window. Doing that types out the path to the file (which might be quite long). If the command prompt window id running as admin, the drag/drop will fail. I have to resort to shift+right-click > copy as path -- then paste the path in.