Customizing Firefox for your school/classroom with the CCK

You’ve already made the change to Firefox, and have been jonesing on the extensions, but now you would like to use it in your classroom. Unfortunately, out of the box, Firefox doesn’t really let you set a lot of defaults for your students. Without help it’s also impossible to set the student’s installation at their home. To the rescue is another extension, the Firefox 1.5 CCK (Client Customization Kit).

The Firefox CCK extension is a wizard that walks you through the creation of your very own Firefox extension. This extension, when installed, sets up sensible defaults for how you work. Some of the features that you can set are (from the FAQ):
    •    Set the homepage (even locking it from being changed)
    •    Change the title bar text
    •    Change the animated logo
    •    Change the web page and tooltip used for the animated logo
    •    Add a help menu item that links to a web page
    •    Provide sites for which popups and XPInstalls are allowed by default
    •    Preinstall browser plug-ins
    •    Preinstall search engines
    •    Add folders, bookmarks and live bookmarks to the personal toolbar
    •    Add folders, bookmarks and live bookmarks to the bookmarks folder
    •    Set default preferences
    •    Lock preferences
    •    Add registry keys (Windows only)
    •    Add certificates (See NOTE below)
    •    Set default proxy configurations
    •    Package other XPIs with your distribution
    •    Disable about:config

The biggies are the ability to set the homepage, adding folders, bookmarks, and live bookmarks. You can also automatically install extensions, such as my favorites, CopyURL+ and del.icio.us Complete. (Under Windows, you will need to make sure zip.exe is somewhere in your path.

After you walk through the wizard, it creates an extension. This extension can then be distributed to setup Firefox. If you are using it in your classroom you can use the following command line to install the extension as a global extension so it is in Firefox for anyone who uses Firefox on the machine:

firefox -install-global-extension MyExtension.xpi

You’ll need to use the full path to Firefox, for example, under Windows it is probably:
c:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe -install-global-extension MyExtension.xpi

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