Extending Drag-and-Drop Further
If you're an advanced drag-and-dropper, the Firefox Super Drag and Go extension offers even more drag-and-drop fun. For example, it allows you to drag- and drop a link on a page half an inch in any direction to open it in a new tab. Likewise, you can drag and drop text half an inch in any direction to search for it on the Web. The extension is available in the Navigation and Tabbed Browsing categories of the official Mozilla Update page. After you install it, be sure to check out its options window for all the things you can do.
One other neat extension deserves a mention, even though it isn't strictly a drag-and-drop extension — more just drag. It's called Grab and Drag, and it's a novel approach to scrolling Web pages. The simple act of scrolling has seen a number of innovations over the past decade. Where you once had to reach for the scroll bar along the window edge, you can now scroll without moving the mouse, thanks to scroll wheels (or buttons) featured by most modern mice. But scrolling itself remains somewhat jerky and can be distracting when you're intently reading a long document line by line.
With Grab and Drag, you scroll a page simply by grabbing it (beginning a drag in an empty part of the page) and dragging it up, down, left, or right depending on the direction you want to scroll. The farther you move the mouse from the place where you began the drag, the farther the page scrolls. As confusing as this might sound, it's very intuitive when you try it out because it mimics the tactile experience of sliding a long scroll up or down along a table. It's a great way to scroll long documents because you control how much of the document to scroll, and the experience is as smooth as your drag. All the traditional scrolling mechanisms, such as the scroll bar and mouse wheel, continue to work as usual.
| REMEMBER | When Grab and Drag is enabled, you can't select text on a Web page (because selection requires the same kind of grabbing action). To temporarily disable Grab and Drag so you can select text, choose Tools |
See Chapter 20 for more information about installing and configuring extensions.
