Normally, when you want to search on a phrase that you see on a webpage, you tend to go to a search engine’s home page, enter the phrase. and search. There is a person that has created a slick way to do this via drag and drop in your Firefox browser to different search engines. The add-on is called Drag And DropZones and is available here.
How it works
Once you have installed it, when you highlight some text and hold down the left mouse button, a grid will come up with different zones representing all of the different search engines that are available for your browser. Now you just drag your text into one of these zones and a new tab will come up that will function the same as if you went to the search engine’s home page and entered this phrase.
Here is a screenshot from the developer showing the different zones when you highlight text and start dragging it.
Configuring the add-on
From the Tools Menu, you can select “Drag And DropZones Settings” to get the following dialog box. This will let you configure the order of the zones, as well as delete any that you don’t want. Note, the list of search engines is what is configured in your browser, if you want to add other ones to this list, you need to add them to the browser first.
To switch the order of the zones, just drag one of the icons to another square (or back to the list of search engines on the left if you want to remove it from available zones).
How do you turn off this add-on if you have other drag and drop extensions?
If you have other add-ons that use Firefox’s drag and drop capability, you can turn off this add-on by adding the following icon to your toolbar (you can get to it via the Views/Toolbars/Customize menu option – then just drag this icon to the toolbar).
This is the icon you are looking for:
When the add-on is deactivated, it will look like this:
