Firefox Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 77. Customize Firefox's Interface

Tweak and modify the browser's
interface to suit your needs.

Firefox is generally hailed as having an excellent
user
interface (UI). The art of user-interface design is one of making
compromises, where each feature must be carefully weighed and
evaluated before inclusion. While this strategy of catering to the
lowest common denominator leads to the greatest amount of
satisfaction for the largest number of users, it generally fails to
maximize utility for individual users. There will inevitably be parts
of the browser that some will find useless, unpleasant, or downright
intrusive. Locked-down kiosks or other specialized uses of the
browser also require a more customized interface. This hack explores
how to make Firefox's UI more closely match your own
needs and desires. As an example, we'll remove the
links to the default email client from the Tools menu. These are only
available in the Windows port, so by removing them, we actually make
Firefox more portable.

Since we'll be in the neighborhood,
we'll also disable the key binding (Ctrl-M or
Command-M) responsible for opening a new email composition;
it's all too easy to hit M instead of N when trying
to open a new window, and the second or two delay while the mail
window opens can be disruptive. We could also do a little nip/tuck
work on the context menu, but that is left as an exercise for the
reader.

You can apply this hack's logic to any menu item
that you care to examine. It's the process
that's important here, not the details.

7.4.1. Identifying the Objective

The first goal of this hack is simply to figure
out what it is that needs to be
removed. Figure 7-3 shows the Tools menu with the
target menu items highlighted.

Figure 7-3. Unwanted menu items

There are actually three pieces that we want to remove: the Read Mail
and New Message... menu items, plus one of the surrounding menu
separators (so that we don't get two adjacent
separators when we're done). In order to allow
Firefox to be translated into many languages, text strings such as
Read Mail and New Message are
kept separate from the code that creates the menu items, so we
can't simply search for them, but the keyword
mail will probably lead us in the right direction.

7.4.2. Ready...

It is always a good idea to close Firefox before editing any files
that it uses while running. Once that's done, our
next task is to find the file that contains those menu items.
We'll be modifying the browser code itself (this is,
after all, "Hacking the Chrome
Ugly"), so we'll start our search
from the Firefox executable. In Windows, this is likely to be located
in C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\.

Sure enough, inside lies a promising-looking folder named
chrome. This folder in turn contains another
promising-looking item named browser.jar. As
used by Mozilla, JAR files are simply ZIP files renamed; they can be
opened with any ZIP-capable program. Use one to extract
browser.jar's contents into a
new folder named browser. Later,
we'll rezip this folder back to
browser.jar, but instead of deleting the
original, it's a good idea to rename it to something
like brower_original.jar in case something
should go wrong with your modified version.

7.4.3. Aim...

Inside the new browser folder is a content folder that contains
another browser folder. Within this innermost browser folder lies the
target of our search: a hefty (approximately 72 KB) file named
browser.xul. If the Gecko rendering engine is
the heart of Firefox, this file is the epidermis. It contains the XUL
(XML User-interface
Language) declarations that create the toolbars, menus, and context
menus that surround the web pages Firefox displays.

We could manually search through the entire file to find the right
lines, but it would be much easier to simply search for the relevant
bits. As mentioned earlier, the word mail should
be a good starting point for our search. The first occurrences of
mail are on lines 93 through 97 and are
commandsXUL that links GUI elements to the JavaScript code
that makes them worknot what we want. The next appearances are
on lines 321 through 324 and are for a context menu
itemcloser, but again, not what we're looking
for.

The next occurrence, however, is exactly what we're
looking for. The following code begins on line 844:

 <menu label="&toolsMenu.label;" accesskey="&toolsMenu.accesskey;">
<menupopup id="menu_ToolsPopup"
onpopupshowing="MailIntegration.updateUnreadCount( );"
>
<menuitem label="&search.label;" accesskey="&search.accesskey;" 
key="key_search" command="Tools:Search"/>
<menuseparator/>
<menuitem label="&mailButton.readMail.label;" 
accesskey="&mailButton.readMail.accesskey;"
command="Browser:ReadMail"/>
<menuitem label="&mailButton.newMessage.label;" 
accesskey="&mailButton.newMessage.accesskey;"
key="key_newMessage" command="Browser:NewMessage"/>
<menuseparator/>

We'll just comment out one
menuseparator and the two
menuitems. The onpopupshowing
then becomes unnecessary, but be careful; XML does not allow
attributes to be commented out, so the attribute/value string must be
moved from the menupopup element to the comment,
like this:

<menu label="&toolsMenu.label;" accesskey="&toolsMenu.accesskey;">
<menupopup id="menu_ToolsPopup">
<menuitem label="&search.label;" accesskey="&search.accesskey;" 
key="key_search" command="Tools:Search"/>
<!--
*** from menupopup: 
onpopupshowing="MailIntegration.updateUnreadCount( );"
***
<menuseparator/>
<menuitem label="&mailButton.readMail.label;" 
accesskey="&mailButton.readMail.accesskey;"
command="Browser:ReadMail"/>
<menuitem label="&mailButton.newMessage.label;" 
accesskey="&mailButton.newMessage.accesskey;"
key="key_newMessage" command="Browser:NewMessage"/>
-->
<menuseparator/>

This is a good start, but we're not quite done. At
this point, if we press the system accelerator key (Control on
Windows and Linux; Command on Mac) and M, Firefox will open the
default mail program and begin composing a new message. Searching
browser.xul for other instances of
command="Browser:NewMessage" shows the culprit on
line 250:

<key id="key_newMessage"
key="&sendMessage.commandkey;"
command="Browser:NewMessage"
modifiers="accel"/>

Simply comment out the entire element, and...

7.4.4. Firefox!

That's all the
editing we'll be
doing for this hack; now, we'll get Firefox back up
and running. The process should be simple. Navigate back to the
top-level chrome directory and then into the
browser folder. Zip up the content folder with
whatever tool you have at your disposal and rename the newly zipped
folder to browser.jar. Then, move the new JAR
file up to the chrome folder. You can leave the
browser directory alone; it
won't interfere with Firefox's
operation. Start up Firefox, and it should now look like Figure 7-4.

Figure 7-4. The slimmed-down Tools menu

Ben Karel