1840145 - When Pinning is disabled in windows, firefox 114 pins itself to taskbar and is not removable

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Installer, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Aaron Peterson]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I had firefox 112 or 113, and firefox was crashing and not updating
I re-downloaded the installer, it installed.

I had:
Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer
LockedStartLayout 1
and
NoPinningToTaskbar set to 1

Actual results:

Firefox was pinned to my taskbar.
Right clicking on it would not show unpin menu
I went to the registry and set NoPinningToTaskbar to 0
After restarting explorer I was able to unpin firefox normally

Expected results:

This seems like a bug in Explorer, where explorer should not show any pinned items... but I suspect that they really want things pinned to stay there (They don't seem to appreciate the Quick Launch which is superior in every way)

As a work around for windows being stupid:
Check Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer
NoPinningToTaskbar before pinning firefox to the taskbar.

Also: The firefox Icon was removed from my shortcut to firefox that is in the tasbkar. So there is another bug related to that.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Core::Widget: Win32' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Ray Kraesig [:rkraesig]]

To be fair, that is the documented behavior of that setting. (I assume it's intended for kiosk-like functionality?)

This would be under Firefox :: Shell Integration; but, if I recall correctly, there's a checkbox in the installer for creating a taskbar pin. Forwarding to Firefox :: Installer to consider defaulting that checkbox to "off" if the relevant registry key is set.