Mike's Musings

Creating a Customized Firefox Distribution

Posted on August 5, 2010 by admin

You may have heard of the the Firefox Build Your Own Browser Project. On the web page, it says it “is a simple way that your organization can create and distribute a customized version of Firefox.” I think BYOB is a great start to solving the distribution problem, but it’s missing one key thing – the ability to bundle your own add-ons.

What I’m going to do with this post is explain exactly how BYOB works internally so that you can create your own distribution that has all the customizations you want. There are a some downsides to our method – primarily that we are Windows only and that we can’t sign our installers with the Mozilla certificate. But it’s the only way we can create a distribution that includes our own add-ons.

BYOB works by taking advantage of the features of the distribution directory in Firefox. The main component of the distribution directory is the distribution.ini file. The distribution.ini does have some documentation, but there are a few more tricks that we need to know about.

Previously I had talked about customizing the Firefox installer, and all that information is going to come into play here. What we’re going to do is after we’ve unpacked the Firefox installer we want to use, we’re going to create a subdirectory called distribution in the nonlocalized directory. In that directory, we’re going to create a file called distribution.ini. We can use this web page as a template for that file. The distribution.ini file is going to contain any preferences and bookmarks that we want to specify as part of our distribution. Information on how to create those things is in the sample file.

Next up are search engines. Search engines are placed in a subdirectory called searchplugins under the distribution directory. For search engines that we want installed for everyone, we put them in another subdirectory called common (searchplugins/common). If there are search plugins we want to be locale specific, we can put them in a directory that is named the same as the locale (This is all documented in the sample distribution.ini).

When I talked about customizing the Firefox installer, I indicated that you could preinstall add-ons by unzipping them into the nonlocalized/extensions directory. With the distribution directory, we have a new option. If we create a bundles directory and then put our add-ons in there, they are completely hidden from the user. They can’t be uninstalled or disabled. The method for putting add-ons in this directory is the same as before – create a directory that named the same as the ID of the add-on and then unzip the add-on into that directory.

If you’ve used BYOB, though, you may have noticed that they do things a little differently. If you bundle add-ons with your browser, they are installed the first time you start the browser. And if you create another profile, it gets those add-ons as well. And they are installed into your profile directory. This is accomplished is via a custom add-on that was created by Appcoast called the Addon Installer. I could find no information at all on this add-on. I’m going to document here how it works, but if you choose to use it, it’s at your own risk. To obtain it, you can download any of the browsers at the bottom of the BYOB page. After unpacking one of those installers, you’ll see the Addon Installer in nonlocalized/distribution/bundles/{04C927C9-E491-4DDC-9D45-54C145422A15}. Just duplicate that directory in your distribution. If I get a chance, I might create a version of this that is open source.

To use the Addon Installer, place the XPI files you want to install into a directory called extensions under the distribution directory. Then create a file called config.ini in that directory. The format of the config.ini file is like this:


[Extension0]
id=THE ID OF THE FIRST EXTENSION
file=THE XPI OF THE FIRST EXTENSION.XPI
Version=0.0.0
OS=ALL
[Extension1]
id=THE ID OF THE SECOND EXTENSION
file=THE XPI OF THE SECOND EXTENSION.XPI
Version=0.0.0
OS=ALL

Most of this is self explanatory. The only interesting part is OS. If for some reason, you need an add-on to be OS specific, put the OS name instead of ALL. You can see the OS names here.

Once we’ve made all these customizations, we can follow the instructions in my previous post to package our installer. Also, if you want your installer to say “Mozilla Firefox for Your Company”, don’t forget that you can do that using the setup.ini that is mentioned in that previous post. That’s in localized/distribution, NOT nonlocalized/distribution.

So in summary, while I usually plug the CCK Wizard, if all you need to do is set some default prefs, add some bookmarks, bundle some search engines and bundle some add-ons, the distribution method might be for you. If you need to do more detailed customizations, check out the CCK Wizard.

And as always, if you need help with any of this, you can contact Kaply Consulting.

Posted in firefox | Tagged cck, distribution, enterprise, firefox, installer | 4 Comments

Won’t Someone Think of the Add-on Developers?

Posted on August 3, 2010 by admin

I have been biting my tongue watching all the changes that add-on developers are being required to make for Firefox 4, but the various theme changes that are going in which are going to cause toolbar icons to be scaled up and/or down has put me over the edge. (See bug 583231). A lot of work is going to be required by add-on developers (and artists and others) to work around these and other issues. It doesn’t help that these Firefox “betas” are no where near beta quality, and involve major changes with each beta update, which means add-on developers are having to do rework with every “beta.”

I emailed folks from the AMO team about this and they indicated that their role is only to communicate what add-on developers need to fix, not to work with the Firefox team in any way to represent add-on developers.

Update:That sentence above did not properly represent the email conversation. I stand by my assertion though – the AMO team does not proactively work with the Firefox team to look out for the needs of addon-developers – they communicate information after the fact. They are not on the front line saying “How will this affect add-on developers?”

So there is no one involved in the Firefox 4 process that is advocating for Firefox add-on developers. We’re just expected to “roll with the punches.” I understand that we’re just consumers of the platform, but add-ons have built up a great deal of brand equity for Firefox.

I find it quite short sighted of the Firefox team as a whole to alienate add-on developers this much. I’m aware that this a major release, but there should be more and better messaging around these changes. And they could certainly be batched better instead of spreading them across every beta.

So please, think of the add-on developers…

Posted in firefox | Tagged addons, firefox | 20 Comments

Interactive Themes

Posted on July 16, 2010 by admin

So you may wonder why we called it Personas Interactive.

If you were go to the Brand Thunder Gallery, you would see what we specialize in – creating customized browser experiences for different sports teams, websites, musicians and more.

These browser experiences have evolved over the years in their design, their technology and even their name. But regardless of the technology change, these browser experiences always required the installation of a Firefox add-on and the restart of the browser for every one that you wanted to install.

One of the reasons we created Personas Interactive was to address this issue. With the advent of Personas in Firefox 3.6, we saw the opportunity to take our browser experience to the next level. So one of the core features of Personas Interactive is Interactive Themes.

Interactives Themes take the Enhanced Personas we talked about last time and add interactivity like clickable logos, sidebars, toolbars, feedreaders and more. So instead of just providing people with a picture of your website or brand, you can provide a way for them to connect with you in the browser.

Before we continue, I have to make a disclaimer. Up to this point, we’ve talked about things that anyone can do (set up their own Personas gallery, create Enhanced Personas) but at this point in time, an Interactive Theme can only be created by Brand Thunder. We’re working on expanding the technology so it is available to anyone. That doesn’t mean that you can’t have an Interactive Theme, though. Brand Thunder would love to work with your band, sports team, website or company to create an Interactive Theme. Just send an email to info@brandthunder.com.

So let’s look at a diagram that shows the differences between Personas, Enhanced Personas and Interactive Themes.

	Persona	Enhanced Persona	Interactive Theme
Background Image	X	X	X
Change Text Color	X	X	X
Multiple Background Images		X	X
Position Background Images		X	X
Resize Background Images		X	X
Repeat Background Images		X	X
Clickable Logos			X
Sidebar			X
Toolbar			X
Integrated Search			X
Feed Reader			X
Sponsorships			X
Advertising			X

So what does this mean in practice?

If you were to go to the Personas Interactive page with Personas Interactive installed, you would see some of our Interactive Themes in action.

Are you a fan of the Goblins Web Comic? There’s an Interactive theme that keeps your favorite web comic close at hand. If you need your daily fix of The Daily Beast, you can install an Interactive Theme that gives you links and news from The Daily Beast as well as the top story of the day updated in your browser. Is your team the Indianapolis Colts? You can connect with them right in your browser. Or maybe you like movies? The Movie Premiere Interactive Theme is updated with a new movie poster every 15 minutes. Can’t get enough of CollegeHumor? Install the Interactive Theme and your favorite links will be one click away.

And we’ve got over a hundred more Interactive Themes coming in the next few months. Besides porting our existing themes over to Personas Interactive, we’re working with great brands like the CBS Sports College Network to bring your favorite college sports teams to the browser.

So what should you do? Install Personas Interactive. Setup your own Personas gallery. Create an Enhanced Persona. And stay tuned, because we’ve got some great stuff coming your way.

Posted in firefox | Tagged brand thunder, firefox, persona interactive, personas | 1 Comment

Enhanced Personas

Posted on July 9, 2010 by admin

In explaining exactly what a Persona was in my last post, I mentioned that a Persona contains two images – a header and a footer. I also indicated that these images are very large – 3000 pixels wide. You may wonder why that is. Personas is designed to do one thing; take an image and put it in the upper right corner of the browser. It doesn’t resize or scale the image. If you resize your browser very wide, you just see more of the image on the left hand side. That 3000 pixels number is a completely arbitrary number that is designed to be the maximum you will resize your browser.

This architecture creates problems.

The file sizes of the images can be very large.
If you have a repetitive image, you have to cut and paste it to make it 3000 pixels wide.
If you want to use an existing image, you’ll have to do something to convert it to 3000 pixels wide.
You can’t guarantee that anything appears in the upper left corner.
You can’t have more than one background image.

All of these problems have already been solved by CSS, but none of the CSS to do anything to background images is available in Personas. That’s where the Enhanced Personas feature of Personas Interactive comes in.

Enhanced Personas adds additional attributes to the Personas JSON that gives you all the things that CSS backgrounds have to offer. This includes multiple background images! Here are the attributes we’ve added:

backgroundImage

Specifies the URL of an image or multiple images that will be used for the background. Multiple images are separated by a comma. The images are drawn from right to left, so the left most image appears on top. We aren’t using the actual CSS syntax here, so don’t put url(‘…’) around the images.

backgroundPosition

Specifies the position of the images in backgroundImage using standard CSS rules. These rules are separated by a comma.

backgroundSize

Dpecifies the size of the images in backgroundImage using standard CSS rules. These rules are separated by a comma.

backgroundColor

Whereas accentcolor in the original Personas specification is used for both the titlebar and the background of the browser, we allow you to specify just the background color. It is never used for the titlebar. If you specify both a backgroundColor and an accentcolor, accentcolor is used for the titlebar, and backgroundColor is used for the background of the browser.

textShadow

One of the other areas that causes problems with Personas is the area of text shadows. We’ve provided an additional attribute to let you control the text shadow. Personas determines the color of the text shadow to use for your Persona by computing the luminance of the textcolor specified in your Persona.


let luminance = 0.2126 * r + 0.7152 * g + 0.0722 * b;

If the luminance is less than or equal to 110, it makes your text shadow light, otherwise it makes your text shadow dark. We’ve made textShadow an attribute that you can specify, and you can give it three values: dark, bright or none. You can experiment with these three values to see which one makes your text look good on your Persona.

Summing it all up

So what does all this give us? The ability to create a Persona that takes full advantage of CSS. If you hover over the preview images below with Personas Interactive installed, you’ll see examples of Enhanced Personas in action. Each of these Enhanced Personas has an image on the left, an image on the right and a repeating image for the background. If you install them, you can resize the browser and see that the images stay in both corners of the browser. I’ve deliberately placed breaks in the background image so you can see the repeat. You’ll also notice that I’ve used a different text shadow option for each of the Personas. See if you can figure out which value I used.

Here are some other things to keep in mind with Enhanced Personas.

backgroundImage is a required attribute. This means that even if you use the other attributes, if backgroundImage isn’t specified, they won’t be honored. The only exception to this is textShadow.

You can create an Enhanced Persona that works with Firefox out of the box. Just specify both a headerURL and a backgroundImage. Personas Interactive users will get the Enhanced Persona.

For our next installment, we’re going to talk about the hallmark of Personas Interactive, Interactive Themes and Interactive Personas.

This is part three in my series about Personas Interactive from Brand Thunder. If you missed the first two, they are Introduction to Personas Interactive and What is a Persona?

Posted in firefox | Tagged brand thunder, firefox, personas, personas interactive | 1 Comment

What is a Persona?

Posted on July 8, 2010 by admin

After I introduced Personas Interactive, I indicated that my next topic was going to be Enhanced Personas. As I was writing that post, though, I realized that I was putting the cart before the horse. Before I explain how we’ve enhanced Personas, I need to give more detail as to how you can put Personas on your website. Then we can talk about the enhancements we’ve made and how you can use them in your Personas. Remember that to really see these things in action, you need Personas Interactive. You can download it from here.

So what exactly is a Persona? You probably think of a Persona as just an image that goes in the background of your web browser. But Personas are not just the images. They are also a JSON file that gives a little bit of information. Here’s what a bare bones Persona looks like:


{"id":"mypersona@kaply.com",
 "name": "My Persona",
 "headerURL": "http://kaply.com/images/mypersona.png"
}

To use this Persona in a web page, Firefox introduced an attribute called data-browsertheme. To designate that an element on a web page defines a persona, you add that attribute to any element (usually an image):

<img alt="My Persona"
     data-browsertheme='{"id":"mypersona@kaply.com",
                         "name": "My Persona",
                         "headerURL": "http://kaply.com/mypersona.png",
                        }'
     src="mypersona.png"
     id="mypersona-preview">

Having the data as an attribute on the image isn’t enough, though. We need to have some JavaScript that hooks everything together. Personas works by using custom DOM events to indicate when an image is previewed, installed and reset. Here’s what preview looks like:

var event = document.createEvent("Events");,
event.initEvent("PreviewBrowserTheme", true, false);
document.getElementById('mypersona-preview').dispatchEvent(event);

Writing this code every time would be tedious, so I’ve created helper functions that do this for you. You can download them here. Attaching all the appropriate Persona events to a node is matter of calling attachPersona and passing it the node that you want to use for your Persona preview.

Now you may be thinking that it would be difficult to maintain JSON embedded in a web page, and you would be correct. What we need is an automated process to generate a Personas gallery. At the beginning of this article, I mentioned that Personas are described in a JSON file. What we want to do is store JSON files directly on our server and generate web pages that use the data contained in those JSON files. The reason for this is three fold. First, because it makes it easier to maintain, second because Personas can be updated by pointing to the JSON file directly, and third because we will use those JSON files for site specific Personas which we talked about in the previous post.

I’m a PHP developer, so the example I am going to provide is how to generate a Personas gallery using PHP. For my basic example, I’m using a top level directory with an index.php that will be my gallery and subdirectories that represent each Persona. Those directories are named for the Persona and contains a persona.json file, a PNG file used for preview that is named the same as the directory, and any other supporting images, like the background or icon. To generate a gallery item, you call the function generateGalleryItem passing it the name of the directory. Here’s some PHP code that does this:


<?php
function generateGalleryItem($name) {
  $handle = fopen("$name/persona.json", "rb");
  $contents = stream_get_contents($handle);
  fclose($handle);
  $persona = json_decode($contents);
?>
 <img alt='<?php echo $persona->name; ?>'
      data-browsertheme='<?php echo $contents; ?>'
      src='<?php echo $name; ?>/<?php echo $name; ?>.png'
      id='<?php echo $name; ?>-preview'>
<script type="text/javascript">
  attachPersona(document.getElementById("<?php echo $name; ?>-preview"));
</script>

With these code examples, you should be able to get a Personas gallery working on your website.

Earlier I talked about the fact that I was giving an example of a bare bones Persona. Now would probably be a good time to talk about what else you can specify in a Persona JSON file. Personas support the following attributes which are all strings:

The ID of the Persona. It does not have to be of the form persona@example.com, but it is recommended.

name

The name of the Persona, as displayed in Add-ons-Themes

headerURL

The URL of the image for the header. Per the Personas specifications, this image is 3000px wide x 200px high.

footerURL

The URL of the image for the footer. Per the Personas specifications, this image is 3000px wide x 100px high.

textcolor

The color of text in the browser.

accentcolor

The color used for the background of the browser, as well as the titlebar on Mac.

iconURL

The URL of an icon to be displayed in Add-ons->Themes

previewURL

The URL of a preview image to be displayed in Addons->Themes

author

Your Name. This is displayed in Add-ons->Themes

description

The description of your Persona. Normally this is only displayed when you right click a theme and select “About”, but for Personas Interactive, we’ve replaced the default display of “Created by” with the description.

homepageURL

A home page URL for your Persona. This is accessed by right clicking on a Persona in Add-ons->Themes

updateURL

The URL for your Personas JSON file. Firefox requires https, but for Personas Interactive, we allow http as well.

version

The version is used only when you need to update your Persona. If a version is added or is greater than the previous version, Firefox updates your Persona. This update check happens every 24 hours, similar to update checks for add-ons.

Site Specific Personas

I mentioned site specific Personas, so I might as well give you that information as well. To enable a site specific Persona, add the following code to the header of your website:

<link rel="persona" type="application/json" href="https://mydomain.com/mypersona/persona.json" />

The href points to the JSON file that describes your Persona. If you want to use a Persona from getpersonas.com, navigate to the Persona and then look at the URL. You'll see a number at the end of the URL. The format for Persona update URLs is https://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/update_check/%ID%. Just replace %ID% with the number at the end of the URL.

One other thing before I close this out. I find the site JSONLint.com invaluable for debugging my JSON. Not only can you paste JSON there, but if you put a URL to your JSON file, it will read it and check it. I can't recommend it enough.

I hope this has helped you get started adding Personas to your site. Next post - Enhanced Personas. I promise.

Posted in firefox | Tagged brand thunder, personas, personas interactive | 2 Comments

Personas Interactive

Posted on July 7, 2010 by admin

Brand Thunder released a new theme for the Goblins web comic today. While it’s a great theme and I’m excited to have it out there, I’m more excited about how we’re delivering it. Goblins is the first theme we are delivering on our new Personas Interactive platform.

Personas Interactive is a new add-on that allows us to deliver all of our interactive themes with one click in the same way that Personas works. In the next week or so, it will be available as a standalone download. Right now you can get it by downloading the Goblins theme.

But Personas Interactive isn’t just about interactive themes. It provides major enhancements to Personas within Firefox and adds support for Enhanced Personas (more on that later). I’d like to take a few posts to talk about what we’ve done with Personas Interactive. First we’re going to talk about what we’ve done to Personas; then we’re going to talk about Enhanced Personas and Interactive Themes/Interactive Personas. We’ll finish the series up by going into details about how web developers can use our new features.

Let’s start with what we’ve done to Personas within Firefox.

We’ve removed the limits

Firefox currently has a limit of eight Personas. We’ve completely removed that limit. You can have as many Personas installed as you would like.

We’ve removed the limitations

Firefox prevented Personas from working with any theme but the default theme. We’ve removed that limitation. They don’t always work right, but at least you can try.

We’ve removed the lock-in

Firefox uses the same permission model for Personas that it does for the installation of extensions. What this means is that if you give a site permission to install Personas, you’re also giving it permission to install extensions. For this reason, Firefox does not make it easy for you to enable other sites to provide previews and host Personas. We’ve created a new permission model for Personas so you can give a site permission to preview Personas knowing that all they can do is preview and install Personas. Now any site can host a Personas gallery! We’ll be providing more detail in the next week on how to do this or if you want to get started now, send me an email. And if you want to see this in action, check out design noir.

We’ve updated the look (on Windows)

Personas on Windows just don’t look right. With the gray tab and the extra dark tab strip, they just don’t pop like they do on the Mac. We’ve updated the Personas look on Windows to be more consistent.

We’ve given you the choice

We’ve added additional configuration options so that you can make your Personas look the way you want them. If you wish you could see just a little more of your Persona, add some space. If you don’t want the titlebar to change color on Mac, turn it off. If text shadows make your Persona look bad, turn them off.

We’ve added some really cool stuff

We’ve enabled site specific Personas. Any website can put one line in their HTML so that people see a Persona when they viewing that site. Of course they have to ask your permission! If you want to check this out, you can load my blog with Personas Interactive installed.

In my next post, I’ll be covering Enhanced Personas. The best analogy I can give is that Personas are like a bumper sticker on your browser. For the artist, Enhanced Personas give you a palette so you can size, position and repeat any number of images on the background to create a design that’s exactly what you want and that resizes with the browser. I think you’ll like it.

One more note – Brand Thunder brings you VERY cool themes and extensions for FREE, but each takes a team of designers and developers. Brand Thunder themes include Bing as the default search engine since our primary revenue source is our search partners, Bing and Ask, so please give them a try.

And before you ask, we’re hard at work on Firefox 4 support. We hope to have something in the next few weeks.

Posted in firefox | Tagged brand thunder, firefox, personas | 4 Comments

How to Write on Glass

Posted on June 29, 2010 by admin

When I first saw the Glass add-on for Firefox, I was in awe of how well their overlays onto any web pages worked. I tried to look through the code, but couldn’t quite get a handle on what they were doing. So I pinged one of their developers, Ryan Wolf, and he spilled the beans.

This post is a must read for any add-on developer. Gives great insight into a really cool Firefox add-on technique.

Posted in firefox | 1 Comment

Customizing the Firefox Installer on Windows

Posted on June 18, 2010 by admin

One of the questions I get asked a lot is how to customize the Firefox installer on Windows and how to bundle extensions with it. I’ve spent the past few days learning a great deal about this subject, so I thought I would take this opportunity to provide a refresher on working with the Firefox installer on Windows. I’m going to do it as a Q&A so hopefully folks will get answers to the common questions they have.

Standard disclaimer: Under no circumstances should you use this information to create a custom Firefox install and redistribute it to anyone outside your organization. If you want more information, you can consult the Mozilla Foundation Trademark Policy.

What tools do I need to work with the Firefox installer?

The primary tool you need is 7-Zip. I install the MozillaBuild package which gives me all the tools I need. Even though the Firefox Installer is NSIS based, we will not need to use NSIS for most customizations. I’ll talk a little bit about the end about what kinds of things you would need NSIS to do.

How do I unpack the Firefox installer?

The Firefox installer is created using 7-Zip. So you can grab any of the Windows installers that end in EXE and unpack them. Any of the Windows installers on the Firefox download page will work. Once you’ve downloaded the EXE, create a temporary directory and type:

7z x "Firefox Setup 3.6.3.exe"

This will unpack the contents of the installer so we can modify it.

How do I bundle my extension with the Firefox installer?

Bundling your extension with the Firefox installer is just a matter of putting it in the right place. Then when we package up the installer at the end, it will get installed along with Firefox. For most extensions, the right place is nonlocalized/extensions. Inside that directory, create a subdirectory that corresponds to the ID of the extension you want to preinstall with Firefox. Then unzip the XPI into that directory. You can find the ID by looking at the install.rdf file inside the XPI. You can add as many extensions as you want into the installer.

What are some useful extensions I can bundle with Firefox

I’ve created two extensions that create interesting things to bundle with Firefox. The first is the CCK Wizard. The CCK Wizard can be used to change various defaults in Firefox so that you can customize it for deployment in your organization. The second is Rebrand. Rebrand allows you to change the internal branding used in Firefox.

Can I change the names used in the installer?

Yes, you can change the names used in the installer. To do this, you need to create a directory called distribution inside the localized directory that was created when you unpacked the installer. Create a file called setup.ini in this directory. Here’s what it looks like:


[Branding]
BrandFullName=Mike's Browser
BrandShortName=Browser

BrandFullName will be used to replace “Mozilla Firefox” and BrandShortName will be used to replace “Firefox”.

Can I change the images used in the installer?

Yes, you can change the images used in the installer. In that same directory where you put the setup.ini, you can put two files, modern-wizard.bmp and modern-header.bmp. The first images corresponds to the large image on the first page of the installer. The second image corresponds to the small image that is used on later pages of the installer. You can use the linked images as a reference to know what size to make these images.

How do I repackage the installer?

To repackage the installer, first you need to zip up the changes that you made. Type:


7z a -r -t7z app.7z -mx -m0=BCJ2 -m1=LZMA:d24 -m2=LZMA:d19 -m3=LZMA:d19 -mb0:1 -mb0s1:2 -mb0s2:3

This will create a file called app.7z that has all the changes we made. Now we need to package that file with some other files to create the final EXE. We’ll need the file 7zSD.sfx which you can download from Mozilla. And we’ll need a file called app.tag which you can create. It looks like this:


;!@Install@!UTF-8!
Title="Mozilla Firefox"
RunProgram="setup.exe"
;!@InstallEnd@!

Once we have these files, we can run the command:


copy /B 7zSD.sfx+app.tag+app.7z our_new_installer.exe

to package them all as an EXE. Don’t forget the /B. It indicates that the files are binary so Windows won’t put an EOF marker on them.

Can I change the defaults that are set in the installer like the install directory or the checkboxes?

At this time, there is no way to change the defaults in the installer without rebuilding the installer. There’s a bug open on this with a patch, so hopefully this will be fixed for Firefox 4.

Can I make my totally rebranded Firefox coexist nicely with an existing Firefox?

There are a couple ways to do this. The easiest way is to use the -no-remote parameter when you start Firefox. This causes the Firefox you are starting to not connect to the Firefox that is currently running. When you do this, you have to specify a different profile using the -P parameter. Alternatively, you can change the internal identifiers that Firefox uses. Then it will be considered to be a completely different browser. If you choose to do this, you should be aware that you will not receive updates and there will be other side effects. This is not a decision that should be taken lightly. Also, your profiles will be stored in different locations as well. If you want to do this, check out the file application.ini in the nonlocalized directory. The variables you want to change are Vendor and Name. Again, you do this at your own risk.

What can I do if I’m willing to rebuild the installer with NSIS?

If you are willing to rebuild the installer, you can change things like the name of the entry in the Add/Remove programs list, as well as the install directory and other defaults. This is a nontrivial exercise because some of the required files are built as part of the Mozilla build proces and are not available in the build tree. If you’re really interested in doing this, you can contact Kaply Consulting and we can talk about it.

I hope this answered some questions folks have. If anyone has any more questions, please don’t hesistate to ask.

Posted in firefox | Tagged cck, enterprise, firefox, installer, rebrand | 10 Comments

Chick-Fil-A and QBQ

Posted on May 26, 2010 by admin

My kids and I were supposed to go spend the day (and night) at the new Chick-fil-A in Kyle, Texas for a chance to win free Chick-fil-a for a year. To get the chance to compete, you either have to be one of the first 100 in line, or if more than 100 people show at 6:00 AM the day before, there is a raffle for the 100 spots. In this case, there were more than 100 people (175) and we arrived at 6:05 AM due to some navigation issues. So we were out of luck. We had planned to make a fun day and night out of this, so needless to say the kids were pretty disappointed.

As I began processing why we were late, I immediately started looking for ways to shift the blame. Why did Google Maps have the exit number wrong? Why doesn’t Chick-fil-A have the location of new restaurants in its restaurant finder? Why wasn’t there a giant cow on top of the building to make it easy to spot? And suddenly it occurred to me that I had fallen into the blame game. I was asking the wrong questions.

In his incredible book, QBQ, John G. Miller talks about asking the The Question Behind the Question®. So I started asking the right question. What could I have done differently? I could have left earlier. I could have double checked the directions. I could have contacted the Kyle Chick-fil-A to make sure I knew where it was. And I realized that it wasn’t Google Maps’ fault. And it wasn’t Chick-fil-A’s fault. It was my fault. I could have done something. I needed to practice personal accountability.

Whenever we choose to practice personal accountability, we’re going completely against the tide of our culture. Articles like this one about blame shifting the BP oil spill make it abundantly clear – we’re not interested in solving the problem, we’re interested in finding someone to blame. That prevents us from finding the failures in ourselves (and gives us a person for the lawsuit).

When you are faced with situations in your life that don’t go the way you want, ask yourself, what could I have done differently? And what can I do in the future to make sure this doesn’t happen to me (or anyone else) again? And then fix it. Because it’s your problem now.

So what did I do? I sent email to Chick-fil-A suggesting that they add maps to their restaurant opening pages. And I did some research and found out that all the major mapping software has the wrong exit for Kyle, Texas. So I’m going to contact Kyle and let them know since they have more clout than me to try to fix it.

And I’m taking the kids to Chick-fil-A for dinner. We didn’t make the grand opening. But we can still have a great meal.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged chick-fil-a, qbq | 8 Comments

POSTing Multipart/Form-Data from an XMLHttpRequest

Posted on May 20, 2010 by admin

I’m working on an add-on where I have a need to POST JSON data to the server. Unfortunately that JSON contains ampersands, so in order to use POST, I would have to encode the data in some way that the server could decode. This seemed like extra unnecessary work to me. I decided to use the “multipart/form-data” header which would allow me to send the data unmodified. Unfortunately, documentation on this was lacking. So this post is just to put up sample code on how to do this in case someone else needs it. In this case, I am simply passing data=foo where foo is the JSON.

var xhr = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/xmlextras/xmlhttprequest;1"].createInstance(Components.interfaces.nsIXMLHttpRequest);
 
xhr.open("POST", url, true);
 
var boundary = '---------------------------';
boundary += Math.floor(Math.random()*32768);
boundary += Math.floor(Math.random()*32768);
boundary += Math.floor(Math.random()*32768);
xhr.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", 'multipart/form-data; boundary=' + boundary);
var body = '';
body += '--' + boundary + '\r\n' + 'Content-Disposition: form-data; name="';
body += "data";
body += '"\r\n\r\n';
body += JSON.stringify(JAVASCRIPT OBJECT);
body += '\r\n'
body += '--' + boundary + '--';
xhr.setRequestHeader('Content-length', body.length);
xhr.onload = function() {
}
xhr.send(body);

There were no server changes required at all. The PHP handled the data the same way it would have if it was an “application/x-www-form-urlencoded” POST.

Belorussian provided by Patricia

Posted in firefox | Tagged addon, extension | 8 Comments