Firefox Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 78. Rebadge Firefox

Dig into Firefox and change some of its brand
livery to something that suits you better.

This hack shows how to scratch the surface of the Firefox
rebranding process. You can change many,
but not all, of the obvious brand marks that Firefox displays with
simple chrome hacks. For a really thorough job, you also need to
rebundle the Firefox installer [Hack #28] with new brand information,
and that must be done on top of a custom build [Hack #93] . It's not a
trivial task to complete systematically. Here, then, are the easy
bits.

7.5.1. Core Brand Information

Variations on the word Firefox appear in many
places in the user interface: in menu items, in flyover help
(tooltips), and even in HTML documents. Many of these places pull in
the brand information from two files: brand.dtd
and brand.properties. These two files are stored
in the en-US.jar file in the install area: the
default locale for a U.S. English distribution of Firefox. Pick a new
brand name, modify these files in place, restart the browser, and see
if the changes you need are completed or not.

7.5.2. Rebranding Bookmarks and Bookmark Text

The word Firefox also appears in the
Bookmarks
menu. To hack
that menu, just remove the offending bookmarks:

Create a new Firefox profile with the
-CreateProfile command-line option.

Start up that profile and open the Bookmark Manager.

Delete all Firefox bookmarks and bookmark folders.

Shut down Firefox.

Now, locate the bookmarksl file in the new
profile. Either migrate it to other profiles as required [Hack #25], or replace the standard one
supplied in the Firefox installer [Hack #28] .

7.5.3. Rebranding Icons and Images

Some brand icons are easy to remove; others are not so easy.
The simplest thing to do is to override
the per-window icons that appear in the top left of the titlebar.
They are also displayed by process managers such as Windows Task
Manager and the Alt-Tab application picker.

To do this, create the following magic directory hierarchy in the
chrome area: icons/default.
Here's the full URL of that directory:

". The matching icon files should
therefore be named either main-window.ico or
main-window.xpm. To see it work, just restart
the browser.

Icon files can be bundled with the installer, with extensions, or
simply placed as required. There's more imagery than
just icons, though.

On the easy side, there are Firefox images to change in the default
theme in classic.jar. Look for
icon32.png. There are several in
browser.jar as well. There are also images to
change in the standard install bundle [Hack #28] . Themes, locales, and
extensions contain preview images that give away
Firefox's true identity as well.

On the harder side, some copies of the Firefox desktop icons are
embedded in the firefox.exe binary. Under
Windows, you can replace these resources using a free tool such as
Resource Hacker (http://www.users.on.net/johnson/resourcehacker/)
or the equally free, but also open source, equivalent
Resource Explorer (http://www.wilsonc.demon.co.uk/d7resourceexplorer).
On the Macintosh, the BNDL resource information is embedded in the
source code, and Firefox source must be edited and recompiled to
change this.

If you change the entries in the StringTable section, you also prevent your rebranded browser from sharing its runtime engine with Firefox. You also change the name of the browser when viewed in the Alt-Tab list and in the Task Manager.

7.5.4. Rebranding the User Agent

You can change the browser User Agent string using
preferences [Hack #23] . The best
place to put that preference change is in the
defaults\prefs\firefox.js file in the install
area.