The Prospector team has gotten a lot of useful feedback about the recently added Home Dash menu, which provides one-click access to the Back button and other navigation. One common complaint is that these controls that temporarily appear and somewhat look like menu items, but they don’t stay around like an open menu.

We’re glad to report that the newest version now not only moves the Firefox icon to your pointer on right-click, it’ll stay there as long as the usual context menu is open or if you point at the icon. This means you no longer need to right-click and hold the mouse button and move the pointer to the Back button. Instead you can just tap a right-click and freely move your mouse without cramping your hands. But of course you still have the option to do a single-click, move, release pattern to avoid multiple-clicks-to-go-back.

Other ways to access the menu

Some platforms make it hard for the user to right-click and hold; or there might not even be a concept of a right click. So taking an idea from touch-based devices like tablets, the Home Dash menu can now be activated by doing a long press. Just click and hold; and the Home Dash menu will appear just under the pointer. From here you can press again to open up the full Home Dash interface or press a navigation button.

Additionally, if you’re running in full screen so that the Firefox icon sits at the top-left corner of the screen, the Home Dash menu will appear when you move the pointer to the corner. No click-and-hold required to see the menu. If you want to get rid of the menu, just click away as usual. Also making a return is the ability to right-click the Firefox icon to close tabs. Similar to the close tab button in the menu, you can scroll the mouse to skip the tabs you want to keep and right-click some more to remove more tabs.

True full screen experience

For most pages, the fact that the Firefox icon sits somewhat transparently over the page doesn’t cause much problems. You can even still somewhat see what is supposed to be there. But there’s problems if you actually need to click whatever is in the corner. So for now, Home Dash provides a little button to temporarily hide all of Home Dash. You can get at it from anywhere you would normally see the Home Dash menu.

Corner of Firefox

Now that Firefox 4 is released, Home Dash is easy to install without needing to restart. Please leave feedback, contribute, and checkout all the changes in Home Dash 10!

.aligncenter { margin: auto; }