Webkit's native drag and drop capabilities include the ability, at least on the Mac OS X version of Safari, to make elements draggable. Once made draggable, the elements can be dragged not only within the browser window, but also dragged from one browser window to another browser window. jQuery's draggables API do not currently provide the ability for dragged elements to leave the host window.

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/AppleApplications/Conceptual/SafariJSProgTopics/Tasks/DragAndDrop.html

To see this for yourself all you have to do is add the following declaration to any element via CSS:

div {

-khtml-user-drag: element;

width: 100px;

height: 100px;

background: lightblue;

}

This functionality is important to me, because it lets me extend my file manager, in at least one browser, to allow drag and drop of folders between windows, like a native file manager.

Safari's native drag and drop implementation also seems to let you drag and drop to other places like the desktop, dock, Finder windows, but the API does not seem to include any way to place data in those locations once a drop is made. The methods documented in the preceding URL show that you can copy data to a clipboard, but dropped data looks like data fragments from the clipboard, rather than complete files. Point being, this part of the API may be worth exploring as well.