Separate stop and reload in Firefox

I can't really say when Mozilla made the decision to move and combine the stop and reload buttons in Firefox, only that this did happen in the past. The new button has been moved to the right edge of the address bar of the browser. It displays stop when a page is still loading and otherwise reload.

While this may make sense on first glance, it may not be sufficient for the needs of some users of the browser. One example to get my point across. If you want to reload a page that is still loading, for instance if the loading seems stuck, you need to click on stop first before the reload button becomes active. While some of you may use keyboard shortcuts for that for that extra bit of speed, others may not want to do so.

Here are two native options to separate the stop and reload feature of Firefox.

Interface

Do the following if you want to add stop and reload button, or only one of the buttons, to the Firefox interface.

• Tap on the Alt-key to bring up the Firefox menu bar.
• Select View > Toolbars > Customize from the menubar.
• This opens the visual editor that you can use to drag and drop elements from the customization window to a toolbar, from one of the toolbars to another or to the customization window to remove it completely.
• Locate the Stop and Reload buttons in the Customize Toolbar window and drag and drop the icons to a location you want the buttons to appear in.
• Note that the reload button may only work after a restart of the browser-

Mouse Context Menu

If you prefer to separate the stop and reload options in the right-click context menu do the following:

• You need to add code to the userChrome.css file.
• To do so enter about:support in the Firefox address bar.
• Locate and click on the Show folder button.
• This opens the Firefox profile folder.
• Open the Chrome folder, if it does not exist, create it.
• Open the userChrome.css file in the folder, if it does not exist, create it.
• Add the following two lines of code to the file

@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul"); /* only needed once */

#context-stop,#context-reload[hidden="true"] { display: -moz-box!important; }

Restart the browser when you are done to see the changes take effect.

Depending on what you changed, you may now see reload and stop buttons in one of the browser toolbars or in the browser's right-click context menu.