Home Button

Many people have complained that the Home button of Mozilla is placed on the Personal Toolbar. Here's my solution! This tiny download will put a Home button in the Navigation Toolbar of Mozilla.

Unfortunately, the Location Bar gets a bit shorter. The Home button in the Personal Toolbar is left untouched, but you can remove it by unchecking the checkbox in Edit > Preferences > Navigator (this doesn't affect the button in the Navigation Toolbar).

The most recent version of Home Button is 0.7. This release has been updated for Mozilla 1.8 alpha 5 and higher support. Now you can middle click (or Ctrl + click) to open in a new window/tab.

Install Home Button. Older version: Home Button 0.6

Because of bug 152314 it is better that themes support the Home Button, rather than that the Home Button support themes. Many themes now support the Home Button (look for the icon).

If the wrong icon is shown on the button, like the Classic icon in the Modern theme, then you can solve this by switching to Classic and back to Modern again. After restarting the browser the problem will be solved.

The image for the fullscreen button in Modern is the only image I had to create myself (the rest I stole, er... borrowed from some attachments to bug 49543), and that's why it's so ugly. And there is still no simple way to uninstall the Home Button, but I've read rumours that uninstall will be implemented in Mozilla in the not too distant future.

Uninstalling the Home Button

WARNING! Be careful when editing configuration files. Close Mozilla. Find the folder where Mozilla is installed, and open the folder "chrome". Delete the folder "overlayinfo" and the file "chrome.rdf". Then open the file "installed-chrome.txt" delete the lines containing the text "home.jar" (if you open it in Notepad you might see rectangles instead of newlines - try Word Wrap). When you now open Mozilla the Home Button should be gone.

Moving the button around

Some users have asked for the option to put the Home Button another place on the toolbar, e.g. some people want it before the Stop button. This can be done manually by finding the folder where Mozilla is installed, opening the subfolder Chrome, renaming home.jar to home.zip, opening the file in a zip program, and editing the file homeOverlay.xul (many zip programs let you edit files, if not you have to unzip the files, edit and rezip (IMPORTANT: keep the file paths when you're zipping!)).

In the element toolbarbutton, add the attribute isertbefore or instertafter with the id of the button you want to put the Home Button before or after (the Stop button has stop-button as id etc.). You can also use the attribute position where the value is a number (1 or higher) specifying where you want to put the button.

Guide for Theme Authors

If you want to add support for the Home Button in a theme you're making, then you can do it in different ways. The easiest method is adding this lines in navigator.css:

#home {
  list-style-image: url("chrome://communicator/skin/help/home.gif");
}

#home:hover {
  list-style-image: url("chrome://communicator/skin/help/home-hov.gif");
}

#home:hover:active {
  list-style-image: url("chrome://communicator/skin/help/home-act.gif");
}

#home[disabled="true"] {
  list-style-image: url("chrome://communicator/skin/help/home-dis.gif") !important;
}

#home[toolbarmode="small"] {
  list-style-image: url("chrome://communicator/skin/bookmarks/home.gif");
}

#home[toolbarmode="small"]:hover {
  list-style-image: url("chrome://communicator/skin/bookmarks/home-hov.gif");
}

#home[toolbarmode="small"]:hover:active {
  list-style-image: url("chrome://communicator/skin/bookmarks/home-act.gif");
}

#home[toolbarmode="small"][disabled="true"] {
  list-style-image: url("chrome://communicator/skin/bookmarks/home-dis.gif") !important;
}

Here the same icon that the Home button in the Help window is using, and the same icon that the ordinary Home button is used in fullscreen. In some themes the icons are the same size in fullscreen as in normal view. Then the lines with #home[toolbarmode="small"] isn't necessary to include

Some themes instead use one image and -moz-image-region. Other themes have different names and locations of the image files. The code will often have to be adjusted for each theme. Not all themes have icons for disabled="true". The line(s) can be left out, since there's no known circumstances where the Home Button is disabled.

In som themes it's best to use separate images instead of the icon for the Help window or the ordinary Home button. Then you can place the images in a folder named home (the URL has to be chrome://home/skin/) together with a file called home.css. You'll then have to have two extra lines in chrome.rdf where you register the package "urn:mozilla:skin:skinname/version:home".