Building Firefox: Changing the App Name (Shallow Thoughts)

Building Firefox: Changing the App Name

In my several recent articles about building Firefox from source, I omitted one minor change I made, which will probably sound a bit silly. A self-built Firefox thinks its name is "Nightly", so, for example, the Help menu includes About Nightly.

Somehow I found that unreasonably irritating. It's not a nightly build; in fact, I hope to build it as seldom as possible, ideally only after a git pull when new versions are released. Yet Firefox shows its name in quite a few places, so you're constantly faced with that "Nightly". After all the work to build Firefox, why put up with that?

To find where it was coming from, I used my recursive grep alias which skips the obj- directory plus things like object files and metadata. This is how I define it in my .zshrc (obviously, not all of these clauses are necessary for this Firefox search), and then how I called it to try to find instances of "Nightly" in the source:

gr() {
  find . \( -type f -and -not -name '*.o' -and -not -name '*.so' -and -not -name '*.a' -and -not -name '*.pyc' -and -not -name '*.jpg' -and -not -name '*.JPG' -and -not -name '*.png' -and -not -name '*.xcf*' -and -not -name '*.gmo' -and -not -name '.intltool*' -and -not -name '*.po' -and -not -name 'po' -and -not -name '*.tar*' -and -not -name '*.zip' -or -name '.metadata' -or -name 'build' -or -name 'obj-*' -or -name '.git' -or -name '.svn' -prune \) -print0 | xargs -0 grep $* /dev/null
}

gr Nightly | grep -v '//' | grep -v '#' | grep -v isNightly  | grep test | grep -v task | fgrep -v .js | fgrep -v .cpp | grep -v mobile >grep.out

Even with all those exclusions, that still ends up printing an enormous list. But it turns out all the important hits are in the browser directory, so you can get away with running it from there rather than from the top level.

I found a bunch of likely files that all had very similar "Nightly" lines in them:

• browser/branding/nightly/branding.nsi
• browser/branding/nightly/configure.sh
• browser/branding/nightly/locales/en-US/brand.dtd
• browser/branding/nightly/locales/en-US/brand.ftl
• browser/branding/nightly/locales/en-US/brand.properties
• browser/branding/unofficial/configure.sh
• browser/branding/unofficial/locales/en-US/brand.dtd
• browser/branding/unofficial/locales/en-US/brand.properties
• browser/branding/unofficial/locales/en-US/brand.ftl

Since I didn't know which one was relevant, I changed each of them to slightly different names, then rebuilt and checked to see which names I actually saw while running the browser.

It turned out that browser/branding/unofficial/locales/en-US/brand.dtd is the file that controls the application name in the Help menu and in Help->About -- though the title of the About window is still "Nightly" and I haven't found what controls that.

branding/unofficial/locales/en-US/brand.ftl controls the "Nightly" references in the Edit->Preferences window.

I don't know what all the others do. There may be other instances of "Nightly" that appear elsewhere in the app, the other files, but I haven't seen them yet.

Past Firefox building articles: Building Firefox Quantum; Building Firefox for ALSA (non PulseAudio) Sound; Firefox Quantum: Fixing Ctrl W (or other key bindings).