Rebranding the Mozilla Browsers

By Jim on October 28th, 2004

Cool tip from Nigel McFarlane on how to rebrand the Mozilla browsers. Not sure that I’d ever want to do this but it’s nice to know how.

The Web browsers made by the Mozilla Foundation are highly customizable, either on Linux, Unix or Windows. In this tip I’ll show you how to change the animated waiting for download icon, officially known as a throbber. It’s the icon in the top right corner of either the Firefox browser or the Mozilla Application Suite browser.

All Mozilla technology has the same core technology, and that includes a chrome directory in the install area. Chrome is a set of human-readable, plain text, interpreted files that are used to specify the user interface of the application. Most differences between Mozilla’s Firefox browser and the Application Suite’s browser are differences in chrome. Think of the chrome as Mozilla’s variation on Perl’s CPAN archive, PHP’s PEAR archive, or Java’s JAR system.