I just downloaded and installed Firefox 3 beta 5. The first thing I noticed was that they did away with the Home button (and when you run Firefox 3 and Firefox 2 on the same Mac, the home button goes away in Firefox 2 as well).
I’m sure this change was discussed and debated before it went in. I’m sure that somebody thought it was more logical to have your home page be “just another bookmark.” But this change is going to cause more confusion than it will resolve; I contend that it won’t help a single user. It certainly won’t save much useful real estate on the toolbar (there’s plenty of room for the home button if you nudge the URL box over a few pixels).
Having no home button will cause users like me more annoyance since we’ll have to re-add the home button back to the toolbar on every machine we use.
More importantly, though, this change will really just disintermediate Yahoo, since Yahoo gets a bunch of traffic from deals with telecoms and ISPs that set users’ home pages to Yahoo by default. If a user’s browser doesn’t have a home button at all, that user will be forced to navigate using search (which on Firefox is set to Google by default) instead of hitting the home button.
Update: The speedy and perceptive Mike Beltzner chimed in to say that this was a change that happened in earlier betas of Firefox 3 and has been reverted in beta 5, so it should no longer be an issue. If you’re like me and you installed an earlier beta, you can resurrect the home button using the toolbar customization menu.
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Hey Jeff, had you run a previous version of the beta? We reverted this change in Beta 5, so new profiles should still have the home button in the expected place. If you ran a previous version of the beta, though, you’ll need to customize your toolbar and click “Restore Default Configuration” to put it back in its place.
Holy crap, Mike, you’re fast.
Yes, I had installed beta 3. Good to hear that this got reverted. I’ll update the post to indicate that. Thanks for your comment!
Full disclosure: the omnipresent Asa Dotzler pointed out your blog entry and asked me if we knew about the issue. He’s pretty fantastic that way.
It is amazing to me that the home button is such a hot topic for browser developers. Since Netscape 6 moved it to the bookmark bar, developers have been trying to do away with it and convince us that it is in our best interest.
WTF?! does it take up that much space that it needs to be moved or is it a ploy to keep us from going to our own home page and instead somehow forcing traffic to another location?
To confuse me even more. Google Chrome as a SPECIFIC option to remove the home button if desired. No other buttons can be added or removed in such a specific way.
What am i missing here?