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Firefox pinned taskbar shortcuts on Win7
January 21st, 2011 by rstrong
There is no official way to pin shortcuts programmatically to the Win7 taskbar and I completely understand why this ability wasn’t added. The issue I have with this is prior to Win7 Windows added the default browser to the start menu and with Win7 the only browser that is displayed in a prominent place by default is IE. So, at one time it was recognized that applications that are used often by most users should have a prominent place in the ui and now that no longer happens except for the OS manufacturer’s browser whether it is the default browser or not. Also, I know several Firefox users that haven’t pinned Firefox to the taskbar, use Firefox exclusively, and still have IE pinned to their taskbar… sure, I fix this for them but that isn’t a scalable solution. As far as I am concerned, the ability for the default browser and default mail client to automatically be pinned to the taskbar should have been added to Win7.
There are a couple of hacky ways to pin Firefox to the task bar and I will likely add this as an option to the installer after Firefox 4 has been released for the reasons stated above.
Follow along in:
Bug 621873 [Firefox] – Replace “Shortcut in Quick Launch bar” by “Pin to taskbar” when installing on Windows 7 [Windows 7]
I don’t use windows anymore, but shouldn’t that issue be covered by the EU committee vs. Microsoft agreement concerning the browser market opening?
Why Mozilla (and the rest browser vendors) haven’t brought it up yet?
It isn’t covered by the EU committee vs. Microsoft from what I know / have read and definitely doesn’t cover it outside of the EU. It has also been brought up a couple of times without any result.
I guess this should happen, but there is some appeal to programs not doing it.
I guess Firefox isn’t going to unpin IE if it’s there (and, FWIW, I think the “browser choice” thing unpins it if you don’t choose IE). And I guess Chrome and Safari won’t unpin Firefox either. So then after a little while, those users that don’t know how to unpin and pin stuff will end up with a whole load of stuff they never use pinned to their taskbar and won’t be able to find anything, just as with quick launch, and software installs in general…
It does suck and once again I really wish the default browser and mail clients were automatically pinned which would have alleviated this issue. Some users will likely get a lot of pinned items but Firefox already unpins itself on uninstall as should every application’s uninstall. We definitely won’t unpin any other application.