Hi Gingerbread_Man,

I'm a little confused by this post -- are you actually trying to help someone else troubleshoot a Firefox problem, or are you asking a question of your own? Your step by step list above sounds more like you're trying to help someone else, but since this is a new thread that you created, I don't know if you're waiting for anyone specific to respond to it.

Thanks,

David

Hello,

djst wrote:

I'm a little confused by this post -- are you actually trying to help someone else troubleshoot a Firefox problem, or are you asking a question of your own?

If I wanted to help someone else, I would have replied in the respective thread, instead of asking a new question. Or if I thought an issue was so important that everyone should know how to fix it, I would've created a new support article.

djst wrote:

Your step by step list above sounds more like you're trying to help someone else

They're called “steps to reproduce”. People follow them and reply with either, “Yeah, that doesn't work for me either” or “Nope, that does work for me” and then you know whether or not you're dealing with a Firefox bug.

djst wrote:

I don't know if you're waiting for anyone specific to respond to it.

Two people have clicked the “I have this problem, too!” button, so it's confirmed. As for the bug report issue, anyone knowledgeable about Bugzilla would've been able to help, if so inclined. Since that hasn't happened, I'll just go ahead and post a comment on the above bug report.

Hey Gingerbread,

I should have tried to be clearer in my response -- could you clarify what problem you need help fixing? I was actually trying to help yesterday but couldn't tell if you were in need of help or if you were helping someone else. Now I understand that you are indeed asking for help.

It sounds like you want to drag and drop a .URL file into your Windows 7 taskbar. In other words, you want to use the Windows taskbar as a shortcut launcher for individual websites, not as a shortcut for Firefox itself. Is this correct?

As far as I know, you can drag a website to the taskbar and it will then appear as a "pinned" app in the right-click menu of the Firefox logo, assuming Firefox is already on the taskbar. You can try this by dragging the little globe icon next to the address bar in Firefox and drop it on the Firefox logo in the taskbar -- when right-clicking on this Firefox logo, you should now see that the shortcut you dragged there was pinned at the top of that list.

I don't think it's possible to drop a bookmark directly on the taskbar as its own shortcut -- the only way is to add it to that context menu for Firefox. Note that this is a Windows 7 limitation, not a Firefox limitation. Windows 7 only seems to support application shortcuts on the taskbar (unlike Windows XP and Vista, who had a separate "Quick Launch" toolbar that you could place just about anything on).

Hope this helps!

This bug suggests that you can add .website files to the taskbar, but not .URL files. Firefox doesn't support .website files out of the box: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=605222

.website files seem to also either be hardcoded to launch Internet Explorer, or it could be that the file includes information about which browser should be used -- I couldn't tell from the spec, and opening a .website file didn't provide me with any obvious clues.

A .URL file only includes a link and a favicon, so it's browser independent, but for whatever reason Microsoft decided not to support dropping .URL files onto the taskbar.

Now it seems to have sorted itself out. The only things I've done is update nightly, set it as the default browser, and toggle the “Store and display recently opened items...” taskbar option on then back off.

I don't know what fixed it, but if I had to guess, I'd say it was setting as the default browser. Ever since bug 621873, it's been tied to pinning to the taskbar, and there's no shortage of bugs about that.

I'd prefer to just leave this thread open in case others want to comment. It doesn't seem right to mark this post as a solution, since I had the issue across many Firefox versions and I have no idea what fixed it in the end.

djst wrote:

You can try this by dragging the little globe icon next to the address bar in Firefox and drop it on the Firefox logo in the taskbar

When doing that, I (and apparently two others) were getting a crossed-out circle cursor, indicating the action cannot be performed.

djst wrote:

I don't think it's possible to drop a bookmark directly on the taskbar as its own shortcut -- the only way is to add it to that context menu for Firefox. Note that this is a Windows 7 limitation, not a Firefox limitation.

No, it is indeed a Firefox limitation, but it's unrelated to this thread. Read the bug report you linked to for the plan to implement it and Pinned sites for a description of the feature.

One thing to note about the "me too" votes in forum threads: I have reasons to believe that they're partly spam too. I was once helping someone with a very peculiar and unique problem: he was using an old keyboard with a broken F key running Ubuntu 10.4 LTS, and his problem was that since Firefox 17, his xmodmap script no longer worked. Within three days, 9 other people had voted saying they had the same problem. I find that very hard to believe. But, this is also off-topic of this thread. :) But since you said "and apparently two others", I thought I'd point that out.

We should continue that discussion in the contibutor forum though. Cheers!