Comments for Mike's Musings

Comment on Customizing the Firefox Installer on Windows by Mitch

Mitch — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 15:04:24 +0000

A further clarification…if I install as admin, or as user and supply admin credentials, or install via WPKG, The bookmarks DO install, but only show up under the admin profile, not the user’s profile.

Comment on Customizing the Firefox Installer on Windows by admin

admin — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:37:51 +0000

@Mitch:

This sounds to me like a bug. I looked through Bugzilla and I didn’t see anything that referenced this though…

Comment on Customizing the Firefox Installer on Windows by Mitch

Mitch — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 21:30:52 +0000

This is great, thanks so much for posting it!

I used this and the Distribution.ini to create a package with add-ons and some bookmarks…Firefox is installing fine and pulling both bookmarks and add-ons, but only when I install as an Admin. This is 64 bit W7. If I install as a user (and supply admin credentials), Firefox installs with the add-ons but not the bookmarks.

I’m actually testing this to be working in conjunction with WPKG (wpkg.org) and as long as I log on as Admin, everything installs fine – if I log on as the user, it installs fine but without bookmarks, same as above.

Any thoughts?

Thanks again for this-
Mitch

Comment on Exemptions, Allowances and Deductions: How to reduce your federal tax refund by Kurt

Kurt — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 12:42:18 +0000

That calculator is very helpful – thank you! It was much easier to use than the IRS’s version, and the resulting computations were almost spot-on. To increase the accuracy of the results, I put my state tax withholdings into the after tax deduction column.

Comment on Firefox, Group Policy and Active Directory by geekydee

geekydee — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 22:46:59 +0000

How about an easy way to centrally administer and update firefox? Ya know, in case the enduser in an enterprise environment isn’t allowed to install anythine? As for locking down FF? easy peasy, just edit the config files and deny permissions, do it all the time

Comment on Creating a Customized Firefox Distribution by kev

kev — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 13:53:57 +0000

With regards to the licensing of the add-on installer extension, this was an oversight on my part. They will be licensed under the MPL, and I’ll get that change in place by the end of the week.

kev

Comment on Creating a Customized Firefox Distribution by admin

admin — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 15:49:14 +0000

@Robert Kaiser

> You imply that BYOB builds are not completely open-source?

So these files are definitely NOT open source.

Comment on Creating a Customized Firefox Distribution by Robert Kaiser

Robert Kaiser — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 15:41:32 +0000

Hmm, interesting… You imply that BYOB builds are not completely open-source? That’s surely good to know – next to the helpfulness of your article here.

Comment on Creating a Customized Firefox Distribution by Tweets that mention Creating a Customized Firefox Distribution | Mike's Musings -- Topsy.com

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 17:04:42 +0000

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Planet Mozilla and Planet Repeater, Michael Kaply. Michael Kaply said: New blog post: Creating a Customized Firefox Distribution http://kaply.com/weblog/2010/08/05/creating-a-customized-firefox-distribution/ [...]

Comment on Won’t Someone Think of the Add-on Developers? by Tony Mechelynck

Tony Mechelynck — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 00:15:36 +0000

There also appears to be no interest internally to fix swapping Themes without a restart, despite this being one of the reasons for claiming that Personas are superior to Themes, a claim that is still made months and months after ShareBird put together the SwitchThemes extension as a proof of concept. Those are the things that make me wonder if Mozilla even *wants* add-on developers to contribute. To me it looks like history repeats itself. Once upon a time there was the Netscape corporation (making Netscape 4.7) and the Mozilla Foundation (making what would become Netscape 6); and when Netscape 6 came out, there were quite a number (well maybe a couple of handfuls) of exciting themes for download on its very frontpage. Then the Corporation took over Netscape 6, made Netscape 7, and finding themes for the latter was much less obvious. When Mozilla (the Foundation, at the time) put out Firefox and Thunderbird, they had a new Extension Manager, and lots and lots of extensions and themes (OK, maybe a few tens, but to me it seemed incredibly many by comparison). From time to time I would check them all, ranking them alphabetically at addons.mozilla.org, to make sure none had escaped my notice. Today, Firefox comes from the Mozilla Corporation, Thunderbird from the MozillaMessaging branch of the Foundation, Netscape has died out, but its Suite has been reborn as SeaMonkey, produced by a bunch of slightly crazy volunteers (the word "crazy" is a compliment under my pen) who do it in their free time, under the Foundation's benevolent aegis. Each of these teams is headed by different people, reacting differently in the same circumstances, and having slightly different goals and aims, though of course the Mozilla Mission of Promoting Free Choice is supposed to govern them all. Then there are addons for all of them jointly or severally: the number of these addons has literally explosed compared to what it was in Netscape 6 time, so that anyone may pick and choose: I believe that this wealth of possible choices is a GoodThing™. Even a few (a negligible few by the numbers, but some of them of outstanding quality) are produced under the Mozilla trademark itself and distributed with some of the applications; but when you compare the three .zip (or the three .tar.bz2 or the three .dmg) you notice that the number of included addons is not the same: another symptom, I think, of the different attitudes of the different teams producing them.