Customize the start-page of firefox
I want to know how I can customize the start-up page of my firefox. For start-up page, I am talking about the page shown defaultly as I run the firefox.exe on my windows system and not talking about the home page set by a user(for e.g., if google.com set as home page for firefox). I am not very sure what to call that page as, thus referring it as startup-page for the browser. Also attaching the snapshot for the page which I want to customize, just to clear the confusion, if any. I want to make the changes only on my local computer, and as firefox is open source, hope its not illegitimate to do so. Kindly let me know how I can do this, if possible.
Thankyou
All Replies (8)
Hi, the Firefox Start Page (about:home) cannot be customized - unless you want to change the search engine, which can be done by clicking on the magnifying glass > Change Search Settings.
If your question is resolved by this or another answer, please take a minute to let us know.
No I do not want to change the search engine(currently its set to google as default). But when I right click inside the about:Home page, I can see the inspect element option for the page and further going into that, I can see the HTML code for that page. It must be located somewhere in installed directory then I think. Is it ain't so? I want to know where that page is rendered from? Directly online or it is stored somewhere on hard disk of the installed machine. Thankyou
Those files are stored in the omni.ja archive in the browser folder (there is another one in the pain program folder) in the Firefox program folder as you can see if you look at the title bar of the view source window.
- resource:///chrome/browser/content/browser/abouthome/
Thank you for the info, but how can I locate the directory on my system? Inside the installation directory of mozilla-firefox(program files(x86)/Mozilla Firefox), i cannot find the specified folder structure and neither aboutHome page. I also searched in AppData folder but with same results. Please tell me how to locate that file on hard disk
cor-el posted the "location" of the default homepage - in the omni.ja file within the Firefox program files folder. I can't tell anything more specific as I haven't been the omni.ja file since it was "new" in Firefox 4.0.
omni.ja gets updated with every Firefox version update - so you'll lose whatever changes you made every 6 weeks or possibly sooner with a "chemspill" security update. Which is why I learned to do minor changes with userChrome or userContent css file instead.
Thank you. Earlier I tried opening the omni.ja file directly so it showed me some binary data. Then I opened it with WinRar to find the folder structure as depicted by cor-el above. I was able to customize the aboutHome.xhtml page, though could not find neither userChrome.css nor userContent.css inside the omni.ja, still the style could be customized from aboutHome.cs locaetd in the same folder. Thank you guys
userChrome.css and userContent.css are user created files that need to be placed in a chrome folder that the user creates in their Profile folder.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/UserChrome.css http://kb.mozillazine.org/UserContent.css
Keep in mind that when Firefox updates to Firefox 38.0 on May 12th, you'll probably need to fiddle with that all over again.
Omni.ja files are a special type of ZIP archives that are highly optimized (e.g. file order) to be able to extract its content as fast as possible. It is not recommended to make changes to files in such an archive as you can easily break this structure.