Firefox Hacks

Chapter 3. Installation

Hacks 22-32

This chapter deconstructs the Firefox installation process. The standard install process is designed for minimum fuss. It is designed so that ordinary users don’t have to think. If you don’t feel ordinary, or if you have special constraints placed upon you, then you need to mess that standard installation up. This chapter explains how.

Install is just another way of saying deploy . To deploy Firefox is to bed down all its numerous files into spots where they can do some good. That might be on a local disk, on a server, wrapped up into an installable bundle, or perhaps more esoteric possibilities. There are also many small configuration changes you can make after the standard install completes. You don’t have to build a whole, alternate installation system; you can just modify the current install in place.

In the introduction to Chapter 1, we touched briefly on the profile and installation areas that Firefox maintains. If you skipped that bit, have a quick look at Table 1-1 before reading on here.

Edit Configuration Files

Modify configuration files where it makes sense to do so, and ignore the rest.

Table 1-1 in the introduction to Chapter 1 describes the location of the two important file areas that Firefox uses: the install area and the profile area. This hack runs through the files in those two folders, pointing out which ones can be modified for good effect and which ones are pointless to modify. If changes are made to these files using the Firefox ...