Text drag and drop causes system freeze

[Jesper Carlsson]

Selecting text on a webpage and dragging it (no drop neccessary) causes the whole desktop (KDE) to freeze for several minutes.

[Kieran Hogg (xerosis)]

Confirming this, I hit this all the time. From experience, it doesn't freeze, just make it *incredibly* slow, After leaving it for 10-20 mins I saw the text move every 5 minutes or so but then got bored. I'm not sure it's a firefox bug but I can't reproduce this is any other application under kde.

[Jithin Emmanuel (jithin1987)]

Same problem here. Is there any way to disable this text dragging?

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

Jithin Emmanuel wrote:
> Same problem here. Is there any way to disable this text dragging?
>
>
maybe this depends on the video driver used. which drivers are you using
for your graphics card?

[Jithin Emmanuel (jithin1987)]

Mine is Intel. I am using compaq hp 6910p laptop.

[neoeno (neoeno)]

Intel. Dell XPS m1330.

[Kieran Hogg (xerosis)]

I got this bug again recently and kwin told me compositing was too slow and disabled it. I can't reproduce this without compositing in kwin so it could well be a kwin bug.

[quantumphaze (quantumphazor)]

I can confirm the problem with Kwin (KDE4) on Intel graphics (945GM). When I disable compositing (Alt+Shift+F12) the drag and drop is fast again. It also works fine with Compiz.

I notice it is dependant on the size of the thing being dragged around. If you drag a small 5 letter word it works fine but when you try it with >10 letters it gets noticeably slower. My threshold is 9 characters using the monospace font featured in these comments. CPU jumps from 35% with 8 char to 100% with 9 char.

Is this fixed in KDE 4.2b?

[Jithin Emmanuel (jithin1987)]

The problem exists with kde 4.2 beta latest from trunk. Good thing is that kwin detects that something is wrong and disable compositing and we get a pop up notification.

[Ahmad Syukri Abdollah (syockit)]

This is a new feature in firefox-3.0, which renders the bulk of the selected text as an image that moves along with your cursor as you drag it. Sadly, due to some bug (maybe in firefox, because in firefox-3.1, it works like a charm!), it is not compatible with kwin compositing. To disable this feature and turn back to the good old icon style, edit the following in about:config:
  nglayout.enable_drag_images
Make sure it is set to false.

Since the bug was missed in firefox 3.0, you probably won't see it fixed on mozilla, so someone would have to provide a patch

[gnufreex (gnufreex)]

This is not tied only to FF, every text dragging makes it slowdown. It is because KDE probably

[gnufreex (gnufreex)]

btw, it is nVidia 8800GT