Add shortcut icon on Firefox Home Screen
Using Firefox on desktop, Windows 11. I am a long term Firefox fan/user.
My problem is I cannot find anywhere an easy method to add a shortcut on my Home Screen (which has now been a FF feature for some considerable time).
I am sure there was something available to do this in a prior version some time back. If I search the internet, I only come across articles describing how to do it on Firefox Android.
I know I can manually edit a box on the Home Screen to create what I need.
Sometimes new web sites that I visit appear in the boxes and I can then pin them in place - but the behavior around this is very erratic and unreliable - seems like random chance for an icon to appear on the home screen for a newly visited site. If this was more consistent, I could work with that.
BUT - where is the **intuitive** option??!!
I should be able to right-click on a tab and select "Add to Home Screen".
As simple as that.
Or drag and drop a link, or tab to the home screen - but this just opens the link. I have tried everything obvious that I can think of.
Anyone?
Many thanks :)
Modified by aufladen
All Replies (10)
Hello! You can edit those shortcuts on the Homescreen by: Hover you mouse cursor on one shortcut> Three dots on the corner will appear, click it> Select Edit
If you want that shortcut to not be changed automatically, click the three dots again and click Pin
Thanks Elison, but as I mentioned, I already know how to manually edit and pin them.
There should be a simple, intuitive method to do this either by:
1) right-clicking on the tab and clicking Add to Home Screen 2) bringing up the page context menu amd clicking Add to Home Screen 3) dragging and dropping a bookmark onto the Home Screen
I'm certain that you could previously drag and drop them, which worked OK, but this no longer works. Why was it taken away?!
Dropa, thanks, but that is only for Firefox Android.
Where is the equivalent for the standard Windows Firefox?
That is putting a shortcut onto the Windows Desktop, which is not what I was asking.
My original question should have a simple answer...
As per: "Add shortcut icon on Firefox Home Screen".
?
So, I assume that this function does not exist, if nobody knows?
Does anyone know where I can put in a Feature Request or Feedback to the Firefox developers, as I deem this as an essential but missing feature in the browser.
The Home Screen is about making Firefox more user-friendly, so there should be a user-friendly way to populate it!
Thanks.
You can pin a website to a tile on the Firefox Home page.
See:
Modified by cor-el
Thanks Cor-el, those articles are useful, but I was already aware of that functionality.
I guess my point is that there is still no 'easy' way to add a website to a tile without either manually typing in the Name/URL for the tile, or waiting until Firefox decides to show it as a tile itself, then you can pin it.
I recently had a fresh installation of Firefox and found it a very laborious process to setup all my tiles again from scratch. This process would have been vastly simplified and quicker if there was an "Add to Home Screen" option when you right click on a tab, or a bookmark. Or allow a bookmark to be dragged onto a tile - something intuitive and natural for the user.
It seems like a bit of an oversight that this is missing. I'm sure you could drag and drop a bookmark onto a tile in a previous version of FF, but that seems to no longer work, instead it just opens the web page in the bookmark.
You can save a backup copy of the browser.newtabpage.pinned pref on the about:config page to be able to restore pinned tabs easily.
Changes made manually on the Firefox Home page are stored in prefs that you can find on the about:config page.
- browser.newtabpage.pinned => websites pinned to a tile (URLs)
- browser.newtabpage.blocked => websites removed by clicking Dismiss in a tile (hashes)
That's very useful to know - I will make a copy of that config entry the next time I reinstall FF.
Thank you!
I see that this config value is also stored in my profile folder inside prefs.js, so provides a convenient method of backing this up on a regular basis.
Great stuff!