41477 - Support drag and drop of arbitrary content, inc. plugins

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: DOM: Copy & Paste and Drag & Drop, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Andrew Thompson]

Been thinking about drag and drop for images :
(http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41405) and text 
(http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41237) and I realised that we also 
need to zoom out and consider the larger picture.

There are any number of times when I've wanted to save a QuickTime movie or some 
other such content an gone to drag it out of the window to the desktop and, of 
course, it hasn't worked.

I believe that Mozilla should support drag and drop of almost any content out of 
the window onto the desktop [*]

This would require 2 things:

i) Capturing an image of what then user has selected to show in the translucent 
drag (e.g. the current frame of an animation) [Cosmetic]

ii) Finding the URL of the content and downloading it to disk. This should be 
easy, as we would need to interpret a very limited number of tags (embed, applet,  
img and object would be all of them I think)

Naturally, it would be logical to also allow 'Right click -> Save as...' 
functionality for these media types. I can file a seperate bug if people feel 
that would be helpful.

[*]  A note on the possible connotations of this... Implementing easy drag and 
drop may annoy some companies who wish to prevent users from keeping copies of 
their media. However I'm not proposing trying to circumvent copy protection. 
e.g. there are 4 kinds of Quicktime movies

i) Those where the 'Save as' menu item is enabled
ii) Those where it is not, but a quick "view source" reveals the URL of the movie 
in the embed tag 
iii) Those like The Lord Of The Rings trailer that obfuscate the URL making it 
impossible to find for most people
iv) True streaming movies - you can find the URL but it doesn't do you any good 
as its a realtime stream rather than a file.

In the above cases what I'm proposing would allow Mozilla to save types i) and 
ii) (which any user can easily do in any case) but it would not circumvent the 
intent of iii) and iv), which is probably impossible to do in any case.
I think its up to the companies producing the plugin technology to ensure their 
conent is non downloadable where appropriate (Real Networks do this well without 
any help from browsers), its not Mozilla's place to help them by excluding 
functionality.

Other references - the Mozilla Drag and Drop specification:
(http://www.mozilla.org/docs/refList/user-interface/specs/dragndrop/)

Comment 1

[Peter Trudelle]

No time left for us to add features on this project, assigning to pinkerton for
future, helpwanted

Comment 2

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

How? Doesn't your average plugin swallow mouse events, so you never know if I 
dragged something from within the plugin area?

Comment 3

[Andrew Thompson]

I see your point... I guess in the ideal world events that plugins don't handle 
would bubble up to the browser, but I doubt many are doing that at the moment? I 
really have no idea what the plugin event model is like...

I guess the other solution depends on whether mozilla will implement an IE like 
solution of being able to tab select most items on a page. Perhaps one could then 
drag the focus ring. This woul require someone who knows the plugin API to 
comment.

Comment 4

[Mike Pinkerton (not reading bugmail)]

probably post moz 1.0, but i want to get to this at some point in the near future.

Comment 5

[Jesse Ruderman]

IMO, this functionality should be provided by each plugin and not be part of 
the browser itself.

Comment 6

[Keyser Sose]

*** Bug 74869 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[Keyser Sose]

*** Bug 81784 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 8

[Christopher Aillon (sabbatical, not receiving bugmail)]

*** Bug 88672 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 9

[G Piper]

At least allow a dragged image to drop onto the Mac OS X desktop as the original
image, intact, instead of making it a lousy clipping. Boy that sucks.

Comment 11

[Mats Palmgren (inactive)]

This bug seems to be primarily about plugin content and since we're removing support for plugins it seems irrelevant now.