You may have heard of the the Firefox Build Your Own Browser Project. On the web page, it says it “is a simple way that your organization can create and distribute a customized version of Firefox.” I think BYOB is a great start to solving the distribution problem, but it’s missing one key thing – the ability to bundle your own add-ons.

What I’m going to do with this post is explain exactly how BYOB works internally so that you can create your own distribution that has all the customizations you want. There are a some downsides to our method – primarily that we are Windows only and that we can’t sign our installers with the Mozilla certificate. But it’s the only way we can create a distribution that includes our own add-ons.

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I have been biting my tongue watching all the changes that add-on developers are being required to make for Firefox 4, but the various theme changes that are going in which are going to cause toolbar icons to be scaled up and/or down has put me over the edge. (See bug 583231). A lot of work is going to be required by add-on developers (and artists and others) to work around these and other issues. It doesn’t help that these Firefox “betas” are no where near beta quality, and involve major changes with each beta update, which means add-on developers are having to do rework with every “beta.”

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