When dragging a link from Firefox to Thunar, you can only create a link to the dragged link location. It would be useful imho if you could drag an image for instance from Firefox to Thunar and that Thunar would download the file to that folder.
Created attachment 2085 Proposed patch to add firefox drag'n'drop functionality with wget
I am attaching a proposed fix against svn29263. 1. OVERVIEW: This fix provides an option menu when dropping Firefox URLs to either 'link' or 'copy'. 'Link' retains the current behaviour of creating desktop links. 'Copy' attempts to non-recursively download the file at the URL with wget. If wget is not found it will fail with an error dialog/message. 2. WISHLIST: This fix is related to an entry at http://wiki.xfce.org/wish_list. 3. LOCALIZATION: Line numbers for "Failed to create a link for the URL" must be updated to thunar-standard-view:2737. Localization for "Failed to download the file at the URL" must be added with thunar-standard-view:2767. 4. DOCUMENTATION: This feature might require a documentation update. 5. PATCH: I attempted to follow the guidelines in HACKING as closely as possible but my diff patch and gtk experiences are limited. Please study the patch thoroughly and inform me of any mistakes. 6. FUTURE: I studied the possibility to make the option plugable like Drag'n'Drop menu providers for files. But this is currently over my head and a file-check in a related function prevented an easy implementation. But finding a solution here might open the possibility of plugins handling drops from Firefox. 7. CONTACT If you have any questions please contact me here, per email, or as predaeus on irc.freenode.net.
The major problem with the patch is that there is no visible feedback of the download progress for the user. I'd suggest to not use wget here or atleast fire wget in a new terminal window.
I understand this is a problem that is unacceptable as it violates Thunar's usability standards. I'll research into a temporary solution that uses thunar-vfs and a custom job. Maybe this can be used until there is a general architecture for remote file accesses in thunar-vfs.
Since a port to gio/gvfs is underway (http://www.nabble.com/Porting-Thunar-to-GIO-GVfs-td21060199.html and http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4670) and http transfers will be supported by gvfs, I will not put any more work into a suboptimal solution. Maybe someone could add a dependency on ticket 4670, I can't see the relevant option here. Thanks for doing Thunar/Xfce!
This works fine with GIO/GVFS when dropping uris from firefox into thunar.