[Usability] Drag and drop in Web browsers

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

(Removed nautilus-list, since this bit is about Web browsers.)

On 9 Feb, 2006, at 5:56 AM, Alan Horkan wrote:
> ...
> On Wed, 8 Feb 2006, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> ...
> > > I agree, it's not a Nautilus specific problem, I think web browsers
> > > suffered from the same problem until they started using tabs.
> >
> > Web browsers have never suffered from this problem,
>
> never say never

No, really, they haven't. Hotmail briefly experimented with an ActiveX 
control where you could attach a file by dragging it into the browser 
window from Windows Explorer, but that's the only example I've ever 
seen, and it worked only because it was ActiveX. More to the point, 
apart from dragging text into a textarea, there's been no situation 
where you could drag stuff *from one browser window into another*, 
which is what would make panels useful.

> > because hardly any Web pages support external drag-and-drop,

I should have said "hardly any Web pages support drag-and-drop from 
external sources".

> I loved how Internet Explorer on Mac allowed you to drag an image from 
> a web page to your desktop.

That's nothing special, that's just being a Mac app. Even Netscape 2.02 
from 1995 does that. (Netscape 1.x might have too, but it doesn't load 
anything under OS X so I can't test it.)

> The Microsoft Macintosh developers knew their stuff.

Not exactly. :-) If you dragged text from Internet Explorer to the 
desktop it made a SimpleText document that couldn't be dragged into 
another document later, rather than a text clipping that could. The 
same problem happens with Epiphany, because Gnome doesn't have a 
clipping filetype.

> (Epiphany may also have offered this but I'm not sure.)

Indeed it does.

--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/