I spent a couple of weeks looking at if and how Firefox could be adapted to show a corporate look and feel. I didn't manage to finish the work completely, and my targets changed throughout the project.

Instead of wasting this work I thought I would make my findings public. There is nothing amazing here, but it may save someone some time in the future.

Firstly I had a look at the Microsoft IEAK to see what was available to customise in Internet Explorer. I was impressed by the vast about of options but not by the wizard style user interface. I decided then that my application would be a lot simpler with tabs with various options on. I prefer tabs to wizards as I can go from page to page without multiple back, back, back clicks.

At this point I wasn't sure whether I would be making my changes at source code level or after the application was installed.

For the majority of customisation tasks you'll need to edit files in the Profile folder, information on how to find this folder can be found below.

C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\
Profiles\<random>.default\

e.g.
C:\Documents and Settings\mark\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\
9y372zaq.default

Firefox uses a plain text file to store bookmark information which can be located at.

<Profile>\bookmarks.html

mozilla\profile\defaults\bookmarks.html

Firefox still uses the Netscape bookmark format which looks something like this.

<!DOCTYPE NETSCAPE-Bookmark-file-1>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html" charset="UTF-8">
<TITLE>Bookmarks</TITLE>
<H1>Bookmarks</H1>
<DL>
	<DT><H3 PERSONAL_TOOLBAR_FOLDER="true">Bookmarks Toolbar Folder</H3>
	<DL>
		<DT><A HREF="http://www.firefox.com">Firefox</A>
		<DT><A HREF="http://www.google.com">Google</A>
	</DL>
	<DT><A HREF="http://www.slashdot.com">Slashdot</A>
	<DT><H3>Work</H3>
	<DL>
		<DT><A HREF="http://www.mycompany.com">My Company</A>
	</DL>
</DL>

Which creates a structure like this:

The links to Firefox and Google will appear under the users address bar. The link to Slashdot will appear in the bookmarks drop-down menu and the link for My Company will appear in the drop-down menu within a subfolder named Work

My O'Reilly Webmaster in a nutshell book tells me that <DL> is a definition list and <DT> is a definition term. The <H3> tag was used to define folders within the bookmark structure. When a folder has the attribute PERSONAL_TOOLBAR_FOLDER="true" its bookmarks are displayed on the toolbar below the address bar.

To be completed.

Once firefox is installed the Activity Indicator of 'Throbber' can be controlled using CSS in the userCrome.css file. This file can be found in the users profile/chrome/

user_pref("browser.throbber.url", "http://www.mycompany.com/");

toolbar #navigator-throbber 
{ 
  list-style-image: url("yourImage.gif") !important; 
}
toolbar #navigator-throbber[busy="true"] 
{ 
  list-style-image: url("yourAnimation.gif") !important;
}

To be completed..