Drag and drop

The other day I happened to mention how you can drag a link someone posts in a blog comments window onto your tabs bar in Firefox to prevent it opening up in that little unnavigable comments window.

There are two other handy D&D possibilities I've just been using.

I usually click on links I see in Google Reader to open in fresh tabs for later reading. Of course, the tab bar soon fills up, and I always have Google Reader, Grapes 2.0 and Twitter all in one window. So drag those cluttery tabs off to another window where you can get round to them later. Click on the tab and drag it to the Firebox bar on your taskbar at the bottom of the screen. Stay holding the mouse-button down as you hover over that bar until the list of windows shows, then drag the link over the window where you want to park the tab. It'll open as if by magic, and you can park it there.

Also, you can drag a tab into another application to store the URL. I just made a copy of a bunch of URLs in an email in Agent for later use, rather than leave all those tabs open. Open a new message (this works in other email programs too, I imagine) then minimise Agent. Drag the tab over the Agent bar in the taskbar as before, and the message will open up as you hover. Drop the tab in the blank message, and the URL will be pasted in. Rinse and repeat.

The same trick works between Firefox and IE, if you wanted to see how something looked in another browser, say. Drag the FF tab to the taskbar and click in the open IE window to go to the dragged URL. It doesn't work in Notepad, for some reason. It works perfectly in Word. It works brilliantly in Thunderbird, giving not only the URL but the page title to make things even clearer. It works in Blogger. Here's one I just dragged over: In the name of the Father | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books.

That's exactly how it shows up.

Apologies to anyone who already knew this stuff. What about that Justine Henin, eh? Firebrand or what?