Firefox: Can't drag URLs to Links bar

[reo]

I first used my version on a USB stick, and thought that it was because it wasn't installed. The USB version works fine on XP and Vista.

I installed it, and still can't use the link bar. Build 7100, ff 3.0.10.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Reo

 

[Nikolay]

Try running firefox in safe mode and see if it works then? Just to avoid confusion, I mean the safe mode version of firefox, not running firefox in windows safe mode.

 

[reo]

Try running firefox in safe mode and see if it works then? Just to avoid confusion, I mean the safe mode version of firefox, not running firefox in windows safe mode.

That's a new one for me. How do I access safe mode?

Thanks,

Reid

 

[Airbot]

It should be in your Start Menu under Mozilla Firefox.

 

[reo]

The link bar does work in safe mode. So, where do I go from here?

Reid

 

[Airbot]

Then it might be one of your add ons causing a problem. Disable whatever add ons you have one by one and try and find out which one it might be causing the problem.

 

[Mark]

Change your folder option to view hidden folder and go to your user name and go to AppDatta/Roaming/Mozilla and rename the folder to Mozilla (2) and start up Firefox and see if you can now drag your URL's to the links bar, if that works it must be a setting or addon that has caused your problem and you will need to delete the new Mozilla folsder and rename the old one again and find out what setting it was that stopped you.

 

[wclusa]

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.

 

[MoxieMomma]

Hello and WELCOME, @wclusa:

You wrote:

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.

Unfortunately, as this thread is over 6 years old, many things have changed since then, as far as how Firefox works.
And it's probably unlikely that the OP or others are closely following it by now.

Thanks for your helpful input, though!

Cheers, MM

 

[wclusa]

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.

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

 

[MoxieMomma]

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]

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.