Change the animation icon in the upper right hand corner of Internet Explorer. We offer a variety of
animations: Active Sentry Gun, Rotating PlanetFortress Gear, Quake Shambler (for Old School QTF Fans), and more.
— DrunkAmishHonky
The Tutorial
The Internet Explorer progress indicator; sure it might be fun to watch for a while and may even entrance you
with its semi-hypnotic motions as you wait for your slow-as-a-legless-grayhound 56k modem to load up a page;
however, lets face it, that shiny little E gets dull and boring after a while. Wouldn't it be great if there
were some way to change that icon into a custom animation of a grenade going off, or the GameSpy icon just to
remind you of their power? Well through the use of this guide, you, yes you, can.
The following guide's main goal is to teach you, step-by-step, the process of changing that "E"
(or Windows "Flag" if you use XP) to an icon of your choice; however, much like a weightlifter is unable to
train properly without some knowledge of human anatomy, I feel this guide would be rather useless if I were
to, simply, hand over the icons and just tell you where to put what, without giving any explanation of what's
happening. This is why I opted to teach and allow you to create the icons from scratch. Planet Fortress
offers a selection of pre-made Icons, along with the
Icon Making 101 tutorial to guide you through the process of making your own.
Sound knowledge is also the reason I included some background information on the Registry as well.
So with that said, lets get the show on the road.
What is the Registry
Quite simply, the Registry is the nervous system of your computer when using Windows for an operating system.
Whenever you install a program, adjust your general preferences, add new hardware, or tweak your pc for
optimal performance, the changes are stored in the Registry. Continuing with the analogy, your brain contains
information telling you how to sleep, breath, talk, move, what to remember, etc, the Registry, in turn, tells
your computer how to act, respond, process data, what settings to use, what to prompt on your screen, among
other various behaviors. It controls anything and everything from what is displayed on your right-click menu,
to the size of various memory caches, to the inability of deleting the recycle bin from your desktop.
Even though it differs depending on which version of Windows you are using, the Registry is primarily made up of a few massive text files located within the Windows directory (this might be different for Windows NT/2000). I know for Windows 98 (the OS I currently have on my pc) the registry is made up of two hidden, encrypted files: Users.dat and System.dat. As for the other versions of Windows, I am unsure of the exact files that constitute the Registry, but this information is immaterial, since you cannot directly edit the files anyways.
In order to edit the Registry, you must possess two things: A Registry editor and knowledge of what you are doing. Although there are many commercial editors out there, Microsoft provides a decent one with Windows 95 and up called Regedit. This guide will provide you with the knowledge part. I have also discovered that some Registry-hacking tunes are helpful as well; personally I find John Lee Hooker's "Boom Boom" to be quite adequate while hacking.
Finally, before I begin, I just want to clear up the small misconception I have noted that some people have of the word "hacking." The way I have been brought up on the net and from what I have gathered from various sources, the true, basic definition of "hacking" is altering a program to behave in a way that the author never intended and/or extending the capabilities of that program past it's set limitations. In relation of this definition to what this guide will teach you, Microsoft never included an option to customize the IE icon, so, in essence, you will be forcing Windows to replace that icon, via altering the Registry; in other words, you will be hacking that sonuvagun.
Warning
It should be fairly clear that the Registry contains a lot of important data for your computer. By altering this data incorrectly you can cause programs to malfunction, data to be loss, and, in the worse case scenario, you can cause Windows not to load. If the instructions presented in the guide are followed precisely and if some caution is used, you should have no problem creating and using your own progress icon in IE. In fact, you'll learn that editing the Registry can be fairly easy and fun. This hack has been tested on various platforms, with Win 95 and up, along with IE 5.0 and up and is considered safe to use; however, if for any reason you do screw up, Planet Fortress, GameSpy, and myself, DrunkAmishHonky, are in no way responsible for what you did to your computer.
I should also make mention that Windows 98 (and up) has a semi-safety measure installed called scanregistry which scans your Registry while Windows loads and then proceeds to makes a backup of it. If you boot up and it detects a Registry problem, it'll restore the backup. Unfortunately, if you can't get Windows to load due to a mistake on your part, this device is useless.
A short timeout to inform you that we offer a full tutorial on how to make Internet Explorer Progress Indicator Icons from start to finish. If
the custom icons we have avaliable here do not suit your needs, use the tutorial to create your own. You might
even want to consider submitting it to us, and if it's top notch, we'll add it to the collection here.
File Placement
For first time Hackers of the Registry, we strongly recommend you download tutorial.zip. Not only does this .zip contain the Flag Icon files used throughout the remainder of this tutorial (animationflag.bmp, animationflag_small.bmp, tfcicon_small.bmp, and tfcicon_large.bmp), it also contains samples of the art files used in its creation which are referenced in the Icons 101 tutorial.
Experienced users at this point will have either made your own icon, or downloaded one of the custom icons avaliable in our library (avaliable at the bottom of this page).
Regardless of which method you choose, place the bitmap files in your Windows directory. You can actually place these files wherever you want; however, since I'm a follower of the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) method, you will set all bitmaps within the Windows directory throughout this tutorial.
Da Hacking
Before we start hacking the registry, lets just do a quick check to make sure that animationflag.bmp, animationflag_small.bmp, tfcicon_small.bmp, and tfcicon_large.bmp are residing in your Windows directory (c:\windows by default). They are? Good.
Open up your start menu and select Run from the listing. Type regedit in the Open box and click ok. If all goes right, a new window titled Registry Editor will open up. Welcome to the Registry, mein freund. The first thing you should take notice of is the HKEY listing on the left hand frame. Each HKEY is known as a hive and contains a wealth of information pertaining to the various branches; for example, HKEY_CURRENT_USERS contains information about all uses of the computer including their login names/info and personal settings, while the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE hive handles the software and hardware info.
The second thing you should notice is that the editor has a setup similar to that of Windows Explorer. If you are used to Win Explorer, then you should have no problem navigating in the editor. If you don't know how to use Win Explorer, I pity you: think of it as a family tree, whereas each + will branch off into various sub-categories of the hive. Each of the sub-categories is known as a key. The right-hand frame of the editor will contain the values of the keys. Similar to how a game would be useless without instructions/rules, the Registry would be useless without values for each key.
Open up the following key [HKEY_CURRENT_USERS\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Toolbar] by clicking on the + of each named key until Toolbar is highlighted. Take notice of the values on the right; see how there is the value name and then the actual value itself (data)? We will be creating our own values to make Windows read the flag bitmap instead of the default icon.
To create a new string value, right-click in the value frame. Select New and choose String Value from the menu. Enter in the name SmBrandBitmap with exact capitalization. Double-click on the newly created string value and in the popup type in C:\WINDOWS\animatedflag_small.bmp and click ok. Congratulations, you have just performed your first Registry hack.
Follow the same process to create another string value named BrandBitmap and set its data to C:\WINDOWS\animatedflag.bmp.
By entering those two values, you have just told Windows to override the default settings for Internet Explorer and use the flag animation bitmaps. If you were using the top cell of your animation bitmap for the stop image, you would be done; however, this guide uses the TFC icon as our stop image.
Stop Image Hacking
In order to display a different stop image after a page is done loading, you must specify to Windows what image to use. We accomplish this with the following two string values within the same key, [HKEY_CURRENT_USERS\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Toolbar]: BigBitmap and SmallBitmap. The data is, yup, you guessed it, C:\WINDOWS\tfcicon_large.bmp and C:\WINDOWS\tfcicon_small.bmp, respectively.
Note: Creating and using stop images is not necessary:
If those stop images are not defined, windows will just use the top-most cell on the
animated bmp for the stop image. Obviously, if you wanted a different static image than the top most
frame of the animated bmp, a stop image is they way to go.
Outlook Express uses a different key for the stop images, so if you want Outlook Express to display your stop animation you need to add the above string values to the key [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main] as well.
Note: Windows XP
For some odd reason Windows XP seems to double the animation speed when using Internet Explorer. If you find yourself experiencing this problem: open XP_Fix.zip (found in the original .zip file of the icon you downloaded), the frame count has been doubled to compensate for XP's faster reading of the image. Complete details of this occurrence and how to deal with it are addressed in the Icon Making 101 Tutorial.
Conclusion
Well, that's all there is to creating a custom icon for Internet Explorer. Granted, all this may seem complicated now, however after creating your first few icons, you'll be making them with ease. If you ever want the old default icon back, all you have to do is delete the values you created above, and that "E" (or windows "Flag" in XP) will be magically restored.
I would, quickly, like to take the time to thank my good friend Surmounter for peaking my interest about the Registry many a month ago. Also, if you are interested in learning more about registry hacks, I would suggest searching for them at your favorite search/meta search engine. Finally, I will leave you with a few custom icons I have already made.
If you have a cool icon you think others would enjoy,
send us a link so we can check it out, then add
to our library (with proper credit to you, of course).
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