Windows, UAC, Firefox, drag-and-drop, and related issues

[abolibibelot]

I used to have Windows UAC (User Account Control) disabled as I found it seriously annoying (yes I do want to open that file dimwit, I just requested it, why do I have to repeat ! Õ_Õ). However since a recent Firefox change, it's no longer possible to drag-and-drop text or URLs from Firefox to Notepad2 if UAC is disabled. Since that's something I do a lot, I had to grudgingly enable UAC to get back that functionality. But it caused other issues : I could no longer drag-and-drop files from the Explorer to WinHex (which I also do quite a lot), and a keyboard manager I use to add special characters with shortcuts no longer worked. I found a workaround : starting Task manager “as administrator”, then, from the “elevated” task manager, terminating the explorer.exe process and re-starting it with administrator privileges, then terminating the process of the keyboard manager and re-starting it from the now “elevated” Explorer. So now I have to do all that each time I start a new session (which is quite often since I still have a BSOD every 3-5 days on average).

– Doesn't it defeat the whole purpose of UAC to run Explorer with administrator privileges ?
– Is there a simpler way of making all this work as intended ?

[october262]

does copy & paste still work ??

[abolibibelot]

does copy & paste still work ??

Yes but it's not as quick / convenient as drag-and-drop (for instance I often copy a long list of URLs found in an article or from suggested articles that pop up all over the place, for future exploration, however unlikely it may be considering that the list of things to explore typically grows more in a single day than I could hope to thoroughly explore over a week doing not much else, but once in a while it proves useful – and I sure don't want to waste more time on the tedious task of collecting those links).

[october262]

could try reinstalling Firefox to see if that solves your issue - https://support.mozilla.org/bm/questions/1106595

[abolibibelot]

This discussion you linked to was created 4 years ago, whereas the issue I mentioned, although very similar, appeared more recently (with v. 68 apparently), seems to be systematic rather than randomly affecting some users, and seems to be considered as a voluntary evolution rather than a bug.

[aedipuss]

which is the lesser of 2 evils? i leave uac alone and everything works, so i have to click twice once in a while....

[abolibibelot]

So... this is considered a normal situation, for the sake of a supposed enhanced safety ?! O_o
(My brother's computer is running on Windows XP with no antivirus, never had any malware-related issue...)
Is UAC expected to prevent a keyboard enhancer from working, too ?

which is the lesser of 2 evils?

[aedipuss]

you don't like it there's always linux it's free!