Mike's Musings

New version with fix for search engines not working.

FYI, I’m making a beta of the CCK Wizard available today for Firefox 3.

If you are deploying Firefox in your enterprise, educational institution, or even your household, you’ll want to check out the CCK Wizard (info at that link is a little dated right now).The CCK Wizard is an implementation of the old Netscape CCK that allows you to customize various aspects of Firefox and then contain all of those customizations in a single Firefox extension. Here are some of the things you can do

• Add an identifier to the user agent string
• Change the default home page and startup override home page
• Change the title bar text
• Change the animated logo
• Add a web page and tooltip used for the animated logo
• Add a help menu item that links to a web page
• Provide sites for which popups and XPInstalls are allowed by default
• Preinstall browser plug-ins
• Preinstall search engines
• Change the default search engine
• Add folders, bookmarks and live bookmarks to the personal toolbar
• Add folders, bookmarks and live bookmarks to the bookmarks folder
• Set default preferences
• Lock preferences
• Add registry keys (Windows only)
• Add certificates (See NOTE below)
• Set default proxy configurations
• Package other XPIs with your distribution
• Disable about:config

Note that if you customize Firefox using the CCK Wizard, there are certain restrictions on redistribution outside of your organization, especially if you add certificates. Read the Mozilla Foundation Trademark policies for more info, or contact licensing@mozilla.org.

And please let me know if you find any bugs.

Now that we know where to add our XUL changes in a CCK XPI, let’s take a look at what we can change. You’ll remember from the previous post, we added this line:

and we were able to disable the Options… menuitem. The obvious questions then are, what else can I do and how do I find out what things I can change.

First let’s talk about what you can change. It’s beyond the scope of this article to go into all the things you can change with XUL. If you want to learn more about XUL, you can check out XULPlanet. For enterprise customization, there are probably two main things we would want to do: disable something or make it go away. We already know how to do disabling, but how would we make the Options… menuitem go away? The answer is the collapsed attribute:


This will make the menuitem go away completely.

OK, so we know how to change the XUL, let’s find out what we can change. You’ll notice that in order to change the menuitem, we needed to know the ID of the menuitem. So how can we find the ID of what we want to change? For this, we need to understand a little more about how the Firefox UI works. Most of the main Firefox window’s UI is contained in a file called browser.xul. By looking through this file, we can find various parts of the UI and use our knowledge of overlays to change them. For instance, looking through that file, we find out that the ID of the toolbar is toolbar-menubar. So if we wanted to make the menu go away, we could simply add:


Note that not only did we need to use the ID, but we had to use the name of the tag (toolbar) as well. You’ll notice that the menu is not in browser.xul (you won’t find menu_preferences, for instance). This is because the menu is contained in a separate file called browser-menubar.inc. You can consider this file to be a part of browser.xul for our purposes.

If you’re having trouble finding some UI in the XUL file, try this. Go to the Mozilla 1.8 Cross-Reference and search on the text you are trying to find. For instance, we’ll search on “Error Console.” This will return a DTD file that contains the string for the menu item (we want the one that begins with browser). On the same line as the text, you’ll see an identifier that usually ends in label. For the error console, it’s


By searching on the label, we can find the exact place where it is used in Firefox. In this case, it points us to browser-menubar.inc. We can use the information there to create an overlay that disables or removes the Error Console menuitem.

In the next installment, we’ll learn how to customize the default buttons on the toolbar.

Computerworld has an article out today about Firefox in the enterprise that contains some quotes from me. There’s also some slashdot discussion, but most of that seems to be from people who don’t really understand enterprise requirements.

Unfortunately I didn’t respond quickly enough to the request for information, so my stuff is kind of tacked on to the end. Here’s the key message I wanted to get across (which wasn’t in the article):

The main thing we think has changed at this point is that we (IBM) are working with the Mozilla Community to try to get the community more interested in the enterprise things. In particular, we (the community, as well as IBM) want to help enterprises with customization and deployment of Firefox, as well as work to figure out what can make Firefox better for the enterprise.

I agree with the overall article though. More needs to be done to make Firefox enterprise ready. Hopefully anyone who wants to help with that effort will participate using the various avenues we have created.

Now that we know the basics of XUL Overlays, we’re going to look at using an existing CCK XPI to make our changes. The reason we’re using the CCK XPI is because we want to take advantage of code that has already been written for us. We’ll start by examining the contents of an XPI created by the CCK Wizard. Note that for this example, we’ve used the CCK Wizard to create an XPI that has no customization at all. We’re just going to add our new modifications.

After creating an XPI using the CCK Wizard, copy unzip that XPI into a directory. You’ll see the following files:

chrome/cck.jar
components/cckService.js
defaults/preferences/firefox-cck.js
chrome.manifest
install.rdf
install.js
cck.config

The two files that are important to us are chrome.manifest and cck.jar. Here’s that the manifest file looks like:

overlay chrome://browser/content/browser.xul  chrome://cck/content/cck-browser-overlay.xul
style   chrome://global/content/config.xul    chrome://cck/content/cck-config.css
content cck     jar:chrome/cck.jar!/content/cck/

This file defines the overlays we talked about earlier. We are overlaying a file called cck-browser-overlay.xul onto the regular browser XUL file and we are overlaying a new CSS file. We won’t modify the manifest right now since it has exactly what we need. Later we’ll need to make changes when we want to anything other than the main browser UI.

The next file that is important to us is cck.jar. This is a ZIP file that contains the XUL overlay files. After unzipping this file, you’ll see cck-browser-overlay.xul. This is the file where we are going to make our modifications. For now, lets do something similar. Edit the file cck-browser-overlay.xul and add this line before the <stringbundleset> section (we’ll get into the specifics of this change in the next installment).

Once you’ve made this change, zip the JAR first and then zip the XPI file. Next, install the XPI.

If everything worked correctly, when you look at the Tools menu, the Options… menuitem should be disabled.

What we’ve seen in this installment is that by modifying an existing CCK XPI, we can start customizing the Firefox UI. We didn’t have to write our own extension from scratch. In our next installment, we’ll look at the interesting things we can do in our browser overlay.