428919 - Dragging File to Desktop should start download

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Toolkit :: Downloads API, enhancement)

Description

[Chris Taylor]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9b5) Gecko/2008032620 Firefox/3.0b5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9b5) Gecko/2008032620 Firefox/3.0b5

a link is created when you drag a file outside firefox window.
I'd like a download to be created

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Drag a file outside the window of firefox
2. a download should start saving in the path where the drag was dropped
3.
Actual Results:  
a link is created

Expected Results:  
the file should be downloaded

Comment 1

[Meteor0ID]

Dragging any element representing a file download link, to a file manager or desktop environment, should by default start a download of the file to that location, rather than placing a shortcut to that url. This should at very least be the case for common extentions of filetypes which are not native to websites. .pdf, .docx, .odt, .7zip, .rar, .txt, .rtf and so on.
I will leave the exact mechanism of recognising a file reference between common hyperlinks to others, but surely you get the idea.

Comment 2

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

AFAIK drag'n'drop is usually managed by the receiver app, not by the app that started it, so it's up to the OS to provide an helper that on drop forwards the action to the browser. I have no idea if anyone ever made such a thing, but it's not something fixable in Firefox, imo.

Comment 3

[Alvaro]

I'm the original reporter of Bug 505030, the oldest duplicate of this bug.

The idea has been implemented in Chrome for a long time. It is, AFAIK, explained here:

https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/casestudies/box_dnd_download/

It is not widely used because it is Chrome-only. As an example, the online storage Box https://www.okta.com/box/ allows dragging your cloud files to your PC (IIRC you have to press shift to distinguish from within-page dragging).

Comment 4

[Alvaro]

Oops. Sorry. My report is more recent. This one is the oldest (the third duplicate being Bug 693932).