Mozilla is all in favor of automatically pinning Firefox icon to the taskbar in Windows 10 when you install Firefox 68 release on your computer. After knowing the engagement and retention gains with the test they conducted before, the company took this decision. We’ve noticed Nightly linked in a bug in question auto pinned Firefox to the taskbar on our Win10 system after installation.
Mozilla to auto-pin Firefox icon to Windows 10 taskbar after Firefox 68 installation
To quickly launch programs most users pin them to the taskbar, to do that in Windows 10, you have to right-click on an application shortcut on the desktop and select “Pin to Taskbar”. While this can be done by the user in case of Firefox also, Mozilla wants to automate that when users install Firefox on Win10, they’re targetting Firefox 68 to do this.
Mozilla did a funnelcake experiment on Pinning Firefox to Windows 10 taskbar and noticed there are huge retention and usage metrics. The company created customized stub installers of Firefox for en-US locate and Windows 10 64-bit for this purpose. As the experiment is a success, the company wants to ship it.
This is What Mozillian Roman Testars said in a bug “After successful A/B test that demonstrated retention and engagement gains (see results on bug 1506648) we’d like ship the capability to place a taskbar Firefox shortcut for Windows 10 new installs on release at install times across all locales, for 32 and 64 bit installations. This should ideally happen with Firefox 68″.
We’re expecting stub installers to contain this change and not sure they embed this into Firefox full offline installer as well.
Do you’ve any objection when Firefox instllation do this without your permission? Let us know your opinions in the comments below.
I’m not a big fan of programs putting shortcuts on my computer without my permission, BUT I’m a power user, so I know what I’m doing so 98% of Firefox’s target audience won’t feel the same way.
1Many other programs (including Edge and Chrome I believe) do this so it’s not like they are changing the rules the Windows world plays by.
2)Most users can’t find an icon on the Start Menu (or even desktop) so if this makes it easier for them, then I’m all for it.
I think overall it’s a good idea. People who don’t like it can always unpin and that’s about the same amount of effort as telling a program not to pin in the first place.
Having run into this recently I can’t say I’m a fan. Firefox will pin itself to the taskbar even when windows group policy explicitly denies pinning to the taskbar. This puts you in the unfortunate position of having Firefox pinned and being unable to remove it because group policy will now prevent you from doing so.
There are workarounds. Deleting the shortcut from “%appdata%MicrosoftInternet ExplorerQuick LaunchUser PinnedTaskBar” and then trying to launch it from the taskbar will prompt windows to remove the dead link, but its still stupid to be in the position in the first place.