How about trying rightclicking the image and using the open link in newtab option
That works for me Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, DE Unity, fx20 Mozilla

• What is your OS title & version, & the Desktop Environment ?

Curiosity, how did you add the trouble shooting information ?
Did you manually copy and paste or did you use the add-on provided in the workflow of the question asking process ? (contains braces, lacks some formatting)

John, thanks for your suggestion.

I can open a link in a new window, but if i try to save it (by using control-S, for example), i have the same problem: the save panel comes up glued to the title bar.

(Firefox somehow or another managed to gather all the trouble shooting information. I didn't copy/paste anything.)

Does this also happen in Safe mode or or with a Firefox version from the Mozilla server in case you use Firefox from the Ubuntu repositories?

Thanks Cor-El.

I opened firefox in safe mode and it had exactly the same behavior.

But i think maybe i'm not posing my question correctly.

I think this is not exactly a bug, but rather a feature that i cannot turn off.

The behavior is that i cannot move the save panel when it opens.

When it opens, it is not like a window that you can drag around out of the way.

Rather, it is a window that sticks to its parent window until you deal with it (so it acts like some kind of a modal window with a vengeance).

It behaves like a Macintosh save panel: when you try to save something on the mac, a panel comes up which you are not free to move around, but stays planted in the top-center of the document you want to save.

I would like to turn off this behavior, so that when the panel comes up, i can move it out of the way so i can look into the document for a clue on how to name the image i'm saving. (For example, the image may have a string of digits or letters that i want to read.)

If i have a lot of images to save, it makes the process several times slower.

So thanks anybody for a clue on how to change this behavior.