Replace the Home button with a script / Stoyan's phpied.com

Replace the Home button with a script

Robert Ames commented on my previous post suggesting replacing the Home button with my little site search bookmarklet. I didn't even know this was possible, but I found it pretty cool, so I just had to try.

x-browser

I tried this in Firefox/Mac and IE/Windows and it works just fine.

ok, what is it?

Well, the idea is simple: when setting the homepage in your browser, instead of providing an http://... URL, you can use the javascript:... pseudo-protocol. So for example you can type:

javascript:alert(document.title)

And then every time you hit the Home button in the browser, an alert with the page title will pop up. How cool is that!

Naturally, you can replace the simple javascript with any sophisticated bookmarklet of your choosing (hint, hint)

how-to

In Firefox on the Mac you go Firefox / Preferences. On Windows: Tools / Options. Then in the Main tab, you type/paste the bookmarklet code.

Setting the Home to a javascript bookmarklet in Firefox

For IE/Windows go Tools / Internet Options and select the General tab

Internet Explorer - setting the Home button to a javascript bookmarklet

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 and is filed under bookmarklets, browsers, JavaScript. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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One Response to “Replace the Home button with a script”

David Rivers Says:
March 15th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Hey, that’s a pretty good idea. Cool that it also works for MSIE for those silly enough/forced to use it. Any more useful JavaScript ideas? Can’t think of anything that I’d actually use. Of course I have the benefit of using a saner browser than MSIE; probably this is most useful to other such folks.

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