Firefox

Hacks 75-83 This chapter is for people with no time and no patience. It explains how to modify the files that make up the Firefox user interface using quick-and-dirty methods. Why would anyone want to do that? There are lots of reasons. Perha...

At the base of Firefox is an efficient and unchangeable runtime engine. On top of that is a thick layer of interpreted content. That thick layer of content is human-readable and human-changeable. This hack describes how to find, open, and modify t...

If you want to hack the existing Firefox chrome, that means building on someone else's work. There's usually no time to study all that code at length, so shortcuts are required. The DOM Inspector is a fast jumping-off point that lets you detect t...

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...

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 Fi...

This hack shows how to make Firefox inherit the appearance dictated by the desktop environment, whether that be Windows, Mac OS X, GNOME, or (sometime soon) KDesktop. Instead of looking like itself, Firefox can be made to look like everything else...

You might not like HTML window pop ups, but sometimes there's no choice but to put up with them. Banking sites are a common example. When a pop-up window is stripped of all browser toolbars, it takes away more user control than technical people a...

Blocking access to certain web sites is a common project, whether to protect one's children from the perceived dangers of the Internet or as an April fool's joke for a coworker or friend. Unfortunately, most existing methods fall short in one of ...

Firefox comes preinstalled with over a thousand XPCOM objects (classes and interfaces). Most of these objects provide fundamental services, such as access to files, networks, and data. Nearly all of these objects are written in C++ and are provide...

The set of Firefox command-line arguments isn't fixed. You can add more options if you want. In the complex case, new command-line options can be compiled up into dynamic link libraries using C/C++. It's easier to use a simple JavaScript script, ...