Packaging Firefox With Customizations
The CCK (Client Customization Kit) is a tool that is useful for corporate system administrators and Mozilla partners who want to distribute Firefox with customizations for a particular environment. This allows customizations such as changing the default homepage, adding a search plugin, and even changing the default proxy settings.
Once you’ve created a CCK extension, however, there wasn’t an easy way to package up Firefox with customizations for distribution. I’ve written a utility which can accomplish this task. This tool can take the official Windows, Mac, and Linux builds of Firefox 1.5.0.4 and repackage them with an additional extension.
Basil Hashem has written up a set of directions for rebranding Firefox, and I have some additional notes about my tool below.
Download
Source code (MPL/LGPL/GPL tri-licensed)
Notes
- For the moment, this tool only runs on mac, because that’s the only platform which can mount and create DMGs. It shouldn’t be that hard to modify the tool to run on Windows if you only want to repackage a Windows installer. Patches accepted.
- To work on Windows, the extension must include an
install.jsfile in addition toinstall.rdf. All extensions generated by the CCK do this automatically. It’s possible that future versions could auto-generate an install.js. Patches accepted. - For the moment, the tool only works on single extensions; it will not install a “multi-item package” correctly. This means that when you’re running the CCK wizard, you cannot add any items to the “Extensions/Themes” panel. This is not especially hard to fix; patches accepted.
Warning
It is a violation of the Mozilla license and trademark to distribute customized builds created with this tool outside of your organization without a written agreement with the Mozilla corporation. Contact licensing@mozilla.org if you have any questions.
July 17th, 2006 at 5:56 pm
I’ve tried using the CCK extension and Mozilla Archive extension and have had no luck. It creates an xpi file but it doesn’t work. Also, after creating this XPI would the normal procedure be to manually install firefox and then the xpi? Is there a way of adding my custom xpi into the install and it get installed from the get go? I didn’t find much documentation that helped my case and gave up.
July 17th, 2006 at 6:19 pm
Orrin, did you even read my post?
July 20th, 2006 at 2:37 am
I tried the CCK extension to create the installer. The extension runs fine till the last step where it asks for a command line version of ZIP when I click on Finish.Form where’ll I get that software? Can you please provide the link for it? Will it work for windows?
August 28th, 2006 at 11:09 am
[…] I’ve prepared, documented, and released a production release of the Firefox+extension repackager tool I blogged about a while back. […]