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How do I turn off the green download indicator that overlays the taskbar icon

  • 6 replies
  • 21 have this problem
  • 5 views
  • Last reply by tororoto0

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Firefox made its name as the most highly configurable browser available. Unfortunately, the latest releases (since 20) have forced on us a radioactive green taskbar icon overlay to indicate download progress. I very much want to get rid of that ugly and annoying display, but developers (in a marked departure from prior practice) appear to have provided no way to do so. If you know how to disable the taskbar overlay for downloads, please let me know how to do it. If your response involves browser.download.useToolkitUI, please read the question more carefully. It does not address my issue.

Firefox made its name as the most highly configurable browser available. Unfortunately, the latest releases (since 20) have forced on us a radioactive green taskbar icon overlay to indicate download progress. I very much want to get rid of that ugly and annoying display, but developers (in a marked departure from prior practice) appear to have provided no way to do so. If you know how to disable the taskbar overlay for downloads, please let me know how to do it. If your response involves browser.download.useToolkitUI, please read the question more carefully. It does not address my issue.

All Replies (6)

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Try the following:

  1. Install the Toolbar Buttons add-on
  2. Restart your browser when add-on installation completes
  3. Right click a toolbar and select Customize... from the drop-down menu
  4. Drag the download button to a toolbar
  5. Click Ok

Please report back soon.

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I understand your question. I believe it has been asked before by a poster who preferred that no one know at a glance that he had downloads in progress. In other words, get rid of the progress indicator completely rather than preferring a different color.

I don't recall seeing a solution in that thread, but here's a screen shot that hopefully will be a useful point of reference for other posters.

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That is exactly what I am asking about. Thanks jscher... I read the solutions noted in other threads, but none of them apply to this query (alas). Unfortunately, there does not appear to be a solution. I assume downgrading will work, but that is far from ideal.

Does anyone know of a way to turn that feature off in a fully upgraded version of Firefox?

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Thanks for the response ComputerWhiz. Unfortunately, the Toolbal Buttons add-on doesn't seem to enable me to eliminate the green indicator bar that appears in the Firefox taskbar icon. Maybe I'm doing something wrong with the tool, though. Should I be able to turn that overlay off using it?

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I noticed some activity in Bugzilla relating to a new Download API. A change has been made for Firefox 26 (currently available only in the "Nightly" release and probably quite unstable) to disable taskbar progress updates until the new Download API is up and running. Accordingly, I think it would be safe to disable it immediately but unfortunately, this is not trivial because it would seem to require editing a JavaScript module that is part of Firefox's compressed omni.ja archive file.

If it's a high priority for you, here's the file that you would want to update inside omni.ja:

/modules/DownloadTaskbarProgress.jsm

I think you would want to add this on line 113 (currently a blank line):

DownloadTaskbarProgressUpdater = null;

And/or you might try changing line 219 from

return true; 

to

return false;

to prevent taskbar progress updating.

But I haven't read enough on this to be comfortable recommending a step-by-step solution and I haven't tried it myself. (Creating an extension to override the original file is way beyond my capabilities.)

Hope this helps.

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I have been trying to eliminate the taskbar download thing too, but so far it seems that it can't be done. Has this been fixed? Is there a fix in the works? I am running FF26 and recently had the whoe download tracker fail, but once I got it working again the taskbar thing was back too :-(

Has anyone found a way to disable this "feature"?