Turning off Firefox 3's whizzy drag images (Shallow Thoughts)

Turning off Firefox 3's whizzy drag images

Among Firefox 3's whizzy new features, compared to Firefox 2, is the drag images. If you drag from anywhere in the browser, instead of getting the little cursor-sized drag image following the cursor, you get a preview -- sometimes even a full-sized copy -- of what you're dragging.

It's really startling and neat and whizzy looking. Except ... when you're dragging and you have this large very pretty, and very opaque, image under your mouse, you can no longer see whatever should be under the image -- like the tab where you're trying to drop it.

After two or three weeks of never being able to drag a URL to another tab to open it there (I kept guessing where the tab was, guessing wrong and having it open as a new tab) I went exploring.

Fortunately it turns out they've provided an easy way to turn it off. Go to about:config and search for "drop". Find the line for nglayout.enable_drag_images and double-click it. Or add this line to your user.js or prefs.js:
user_pref("nglayout.enable_drag_images", false);