No desktop icon on win7-64bit

[CybrFyre]

Hi. At least on Win7-64bit Enterprise, I'm not getting a Frontmotion Firefox desktop icon.

Using the 3.6 msi.

thanks.

[golderm]

What do you get in place?

Kind of related, at home I run normal FF on Windows7-64, and noticed recently the pinned icon does not work it's changed to the unknown extension type logo.

[CybrFyre]

Nothing. Firefox is not on the desktop at all.

One has to hunt for Firefox under Start -> All Programs

[CybrFyre]

Hello? Comments from the packager?

I've tried mucking around a bit with the Shortcut table in the MSI so far, but no go. It looks like there's some sort of funky scripting/registry magic used to add the desktop shortcut?

[DraconPern]

The desktop icon is added not as a shortcut but as a shell extension.

[CybrFyre]

Good to know. So, Microsoft would appear to have "fixed" something that keeps the shell extension from working on Win7/64 .

It would also be nice to have the option to have the firefox icon pinned to the task bar as part of the msi install.

thanks.

[CybrFyre]

So, basically the MSI is missing the shell extensions for 64-bit. I added a component to my MSI, and with a couple of side effects (such as no start menu folder, now), I get a desktop shortcut.

[anthonymel]

If your looking for a way to control what programs get pinned and unpinned from the taskbar or start menu then look over this powershell script. If you have at least one Windows 2008 R2 server you can even have this run during log in via group policy.

http://blog.crayon.no/blogs/janegil/arc ... shell.aspx

[JosephFisher]

How might that be deployable via GPO? If it's a Win7 64-bit OS, then FF is located in "Program Files (x86)". If I create a GPO, it'll drop a broken shortcut on all non 64-bit OS's in the OU.

Is there another way to include the icon on the desktop without dropping broken links on 32-bit OS's?

[anthonymel]

First up if you are using the Windows Server 2008 R2 scheme in your domain you can have powershell scripts run on startup and login. Second, why not just create a separate OU for your Windows 7 machines. Create a top level policy that effects every machine and OS then create OUs and policy's that target Windows 7 and then do the same for your older machines. Actually, those powershell scripts will only run on Windows 7 machines so you don't even need a separate policy or OU. But either way will work. I'll share my code if you like. I usually delete the icons and recreate them upon login. Works very well for us.

[JosephFisher]

I'm still seeing this problem with the Firefox 4 package. My workaround is to GPO file copy a batch script, and set it to run at logon. It's simply:

if exist "C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" copy \\<myserver>\Deploy\Firefox.lnk C:\Users\%username%\Desktop\FireFox.lnk

So if the user isn't running a 64bit OS, the shortcut won't copy, since the program files path will be different.