Script to modify omni.ja for a custom Firefox (Shallow Thoughts)

Script to modify omni.ja for a custom Firefox

A quick followup to my article on Modifying Firefox Files Inside omni.ja:

The steps for modifying the file are fairly easy, but they have to be done a lot.

First there's the problem of Firefox updates: if a new omni.ja is part of the update, then your changes will be overwritten, so you'll have to make them again on the new omni.ja.

But, worse, even aside from updates they don't stay changed. I've had Ctrl-W mysteriously revert back to its old wired-in behavior in the middle of a Firefox session. I'm still not clear how this happens: I speculate that something in Firefox's update mechanism may allow parts of omni.ja to be overridden, even though I was told by Mike Kaply, the onetime master of overlays, that they weren't recommended any more (at least by users, though that doesn't necessarily mean they're not used for updates).

But in any case, you can be browsing merrily along and suddenly one of your changes doesn't work any more, even though the change is still right there in browser/omni.ja. And the only fix I've found so far is to download a new Firefox and re-apply the changes. Re-applying them to the current version doesn't work -- they're already there. And it doesn't help to keep the tarball you originally downloaded around so you can re-install that; firefox updates every week or two so that version is guaranteed to be out of date.

All this means that it's crazy not to script the omni changes so you can apply them easily with a single command. So here's a shell script that takes the path to the current Firefox, unpacks browser/omni.ja, makes a couple of simple changes and re-packs it. I called it kitfox-patch since I used to call my personally modified Firefox build "Kitfox".

Of course, if your changes are different from mine you'll want to edit the script to change the sed commands.

I hope eventually to figure out how it is that omni.ja changes stop working, and whether it's an overlay or something else, and whether there's a way to re-apply fixes without having to download a whole new Firefox. If I figure it out I'll report back.