Tweak: Disable Drag & Drop (Preview) Images

Note: This applies to Firefox 3 only.

One of the ‘new’ features in Firefox 3 is a graphical preview of the images, text, tabs, etc. your are dragging. This was suppose to make it easier for you to see where you were dragging the item. For text it is not too bad, but for images I found the preview makes it more difficult to properly drag and drop. Good news is you can easily turn off this feature and return to the familiar ‘box’ outline for drag and drop as in Firefox 2.  To turn off this feature:

  1. In a new tab type about:config
  2. In the filter field type nglayout.enable_drag_images
  3. Double-click on the entry below so the value is false
  4. Close the tab (no restart needed)

Tip Source: CyberNet News

28 Comments on Tweak: Disable Drag & Drop (Preview) Images

  1. Is there any way to enable dragging images from webpages to Photoshop to open them? I really miss that feature from Fx2

  2. elok computer | July 9, 2008 at 8:19 PM |

    thank’s for your information…

  3. information | July 9, 2008 at 8:20 PM |

    disable image

  4. technology | July 9, 2008 at 8:35 PM |

    i’m not undestand

  5. I’m with the #1313 comment — I miss the feature of being able to drag and drop from Firefox to other applications, it seems this is not possible now. I used to drag images from the web into Google Talk — great for collaborating on a project and wanting to show thumbnails of stock photos to my partner.

    Now when I drag and drop it just pastes in the link to the photo rather than the photo itself.

    The same problem exists with the preview on or off — doesn’t affect this.

    Any help would be appreciated

  6. Yeah. I agree with the previous comment totally. Picture drag & drop is greatly missed. Quite frankly, that spoiled whole fun of Firefox 3 for me.

  7. Does this have anything to do with the inability to drag and drop images into your MSN Messenger to use as Display pics as well? It doesn’t seem to work for me anymore and I was wondering if there’s a way to fix that…

  8. search on google & u can get a best solution.

  9. By using oncontextmenu attributre u can prevent right mouse click over image etc. Thank u……..

  10. Is there any way to disable drag&drop FF “feature” in JavaScript?
    Tnx.

  11. Sorry, I thought from JavaScript … Let me explain. I have JavaScript code and all I have to do to disable drag&drop for IE is attach ondragstart event and return boolean false. This works for IE, but not in FF … Any suggestion is welcome.

  12. Thanks. This helped a lot. It wasn’t working too well on Ubuntu so I was searching for a way to disable it.

  13. Thanks a lot for this post. It helped me solve a new annoyance and a long-time annoyance.

  14. Thank you, this “feature” is completely useless and greatly anooying (I have Ubuntu, too; maybe this is part of the problem).

  15. Is there a way to have pre-3.5 behaviour when dragging tabs? I want the old small rectangular piece when I drag tabs. The large thumbnail previews now are horrible.

      • In firefox 3+ (before 3.5), when I drag a tab, the mouse cursor has a small thin rectangular piece/strip to indicate that I am dragging a tab.

        By applying the change mentioned on this page, there is completely no indication that I am dragging a tab. There is nothing at the tip of my mouse cursor that shows that I am dragging a tab.

        What I want is to revert to the behaviour just before firefox 3.5. Currently, dragging a tab results in a gigantic thumbnail preview of the entire webpage being shown, and this is bad for a number of reasons. It causes lag (sudden use in more system resources). The large picture at the tip of my mouse cursor is distracting and it does not clearly indicate where I am dragging the tab to. In short, the functionality is vastly worsened.

        If anybody knows how to change the drag and drop behaviour of tabs to what I prefer, please inform me. Thanks.

    • That’s strange. My mouse gets the regular document icon, and I have a little arrow where the dragged-tab will go.

      • Same as spiralofhope here (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.7) Gecko/20100106 Ubuntu/9.10 (karmic) Firefox/3.5.7).

  16. Thank you and god bless you. That’s one f-ing annoying useless piece of sh!t “feature!”

  17. i got this problem recently that is see these small icons of the users in the top of the screen. normally you see this when you hover over a contact. its quite weird and when browsing through posts the list gets longer and longer and so my actual browsing screen of gmail gets smaller and smaller. THis is quite annoying

  18. i got this problem recently that is see these small icons of the users in the top of the screen. normally you see this when you hover over a contact. its quite weird and when browsing through posts the list gets longer and longer and so my actual browsing screen of gmail gets smaller and smaller. THis is quite annoying. sorry for the double post but i wanted to be notified

  19. thanks for this tweak. it totally disable the thumbnail of the tab when i’m dragging it. thanks alot! 🙂

  20. darkocean | May 25, 2012 at 11:40 AM |

    Thanks this was getting seriously annoying when what I mean to do is highlight and copy the text next to a picture. gah!

  21. Thanks for this tip, it was getting really annoying using the trackpad on my laptop and accidentally dragging images to the desktop or other apps!

  22. buythiscomputer | June 20, 2013 at 12:43 PM |

    Thank you ! It was so boring not to be able where I was droping my picture in a table because it was too big and hiding the said table.

  23. It works very well yet. hehe

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