Well I'm running as root to eliminate any permission problems, I'm just using the default file manager that is with gnome.

I'm on 10.04 Lucid Lynx and am having the same issue as the original poster.

I suspect that either Nautilus or Gnome itself has changed its drag-and-drop behaviour recently - probably within the last two or three months.

For example, if I'm on the Birthday Reminder page at Thunderbird add-ons, I used to be able to drag-and-drop the favicon from the Location bar, or even from the History tab, into an open Nautilus window and it would create something like a Birthday\ Reminder.desktop file (a "link" file) whose contents were like the following:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Birthday Reminder
Type=Link
URL=https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/3680/
Icon=gnome-fs-bookmark
Name[en_AU]=Birthday Reminder

When I try to do this now, instead of a nice .desktop file, I get a file named "3680" which is the HTML content of the current page.

Further evidence that this is a change in Nautilus/Gnome: I can drag-and-drop the favicon from Firefox's Location bar into Konqueror and it opens the correct URL. If I then drag-and-drop the favicon from Konqueror's Location bar into Nautilus I again get a HTML file instead of the expected .desktop file.

Can anyone else confirm this behaviour?

Actually, the second behavior makes more sense. Dropping a URL of a remote file copies (downloads) it, just like dropping a local URL (a file on your computer) would copy it.

Actually, it makes no sense at all. Every browser I've used that supports drag-and-drop of the favicon from the location bar has always created a .desktop file (Linux) or .url file (Windows) in the shell.

Nautilus used to do this consistently, but something has changed. For example, I just visited the following URLs in Firefox, waited for the pages to complete loading, and then dragged the favicon from the location bar into a Nautilus window viewing an empty folder...

1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

Generates a HTML file named: firefox

2. http://www.amazon.com/

Error while copying "/".
There was an error getting information about "/".
Show more details: HTTP Error: Method Not Allowed

3. http://www.ebay.com/

Error while copying "/".
There was an error copying the file into /home/USER/directory.
Show more details: Error opening file '/': Is a directory

4. http://www.wikipedia.org/

Correctly generates a link file named: Link\ to\ Wikipedia.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Link to Wikipedia
Type=Link
URL=http://www.wikipedia.org/
Icon=gnome-fs-bookmark

That's pretty inconsistent behaviour, but at least the .desktop file generation isn't totally and completely broken. It's just Pot Luck.

What I meant was that downloading the HTML would be the natural behavior if someone didn't write code to intervene and create a desktop file.