[Techtalk] Mozilla/Firefox customization

[dominik schramm]

Hi,

"Riccarda Cassini" <riccarda.cassini at gmx.de> writes:

> Funnily, there actually appears to be an "about:about". At least
> that's what the existence of the code line
>
>     { "about", "chrome://global/content/aboutAbout.html", PR_FALSE }
>
> suggests to me. Typing "about:about" has no effect, though... 

I'm using Mozilla 1.6, and this does have an effect:
it shows a list of all "about:" possibilites:

about:
about:about
about:blank
about:bloat
about:buildconfig
about:cache
about:cache-entry
about:config
about:credits
about:logo
about:mozilla
about:plugins


> I tried hunting for that "aboutAbout.html", but it doesn't seem to
> be included anywhere with the files that come with the Firefox
> installation. Not even hidden somewhere in one of the .jar files.
> Well, maybe it's planned for future versions to come...

I found it here:
/usr/local/mozilla/chrome/toolkit.jar
------- ^^ --------
(This is my mozilla installation directory)


$ unzip -l /usr/local/mozilla/chrome/toolkit.jar
[...]
     3417  09-13-03 21:32   content/global/aboutAbout.html
[...]


The about links are not statically included, but are constructed using
this JavaScript code (plus some sorting and reformatting):

for (var cid in Components.classes) 
{
   var result = cid.match(/@mozilla.org\/network\/protocol\/about;1\?what\=(.*)$/);
   if (result) 
   {
      gProtocols.push(result[1]);
   }
}

> (My guess about that "chrome://" protocol is, that it is typically
> referring to internal files - I could be wrong, though...)

chrome:// URIs refer to stuff under the chrome subdirectories in the
mozilla installation directory and the user's profile directory.  

The path given -- e.g. global/content/aboutAbout.html -- is either
directly accessible as a file, or it's inside a jar file. In any case,
AFAIK, there is no magic involved: if you unzipped all the jar files
inside the user's and the installation chrome directories, you would
see all those chrome paths directly as subdirectories and files below
those chrome root directories.

regards,
dominik