497612 - confusing drag feedback when dropping a tab outside the browser window

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

When dragging a tab from the tab-bar and dropping it outside the browser window to create a new window, the ghost image being dragged will "spring back" to its starting position when dropped, before the new window is created. 

To reproduce (on Mac OS X):
* Open a Firefox window with two tabs.
* Size the window to occupy about half the screen.
* Drag one of the tabs into the other half of the screen, outside the existing browser window.
* Release the mouse button.

Result: The drag image will spring back to its starting position before disappearing and being replaced by the new window.

This feedback implies "invalid drop location" and suggests that the drag/drop operation has been aborted, not a successful drop. Better behavior would be for the drag image to simply disappear; still better would be to animate the transformation from drag image to the new window.

This occurs on OS X (tested on 10.5) but not on Win XP (according to aakashd in #testday).

Comment 1

[Daniel C]

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090612 Minefield/3.6a1pre

The "spring back" behavious occurs for me too on Linux, and the whole detach feels unpolished. There is a noticeable delay where nothing appears to be happening (meaning that you're unsure whether it's worked or not), and sometimes it doesn't actually detach.

This is testing in the same way (resize to half of screen, drag tab to empty space on desktop).