How to edit the about:mozilla text

[John connor]

There is an Easter egg in Firefox, Pale Moon, CyberFox and probably the other variants where when you navigate to about:mozilla you will see some text. It stems from this.

Would you like to change that text? Read on.

You will need two tools:

1) Notepad ++ https://notepad-plus-plus.org/

2) Power Archiver http://www.powerarchiver.com/ (Free for 30 days)



The about:mozilla text is stored in an archive called omni.ja located in the C:\Program Files\Pale Moon\ directory. This .ja file is an archive that has been optimized for IO so that the browser can perform as fast as possible. You can read about that here. The .ja file extension in Firefox used to be called a .jar file extension, but from what I read the file changed extension names due to the Windows system restore not restoring .jar files so the .ja file makes it so that it doesn't get corrupted. From what I can tell, although I'm not for certain, repacking the .ja file with Power Archiver makes it optimized. But opening the original omni.ja file and the modified omni.ja with Notepad ++ I see text to links at the bottom, however the letters PK are at the top. I haven't noticed any slow down with my modified omni.ja on a Dell Precision M6300 2.4GHZ dual core.

Navigate to the C:\Program Files\Pale Moon\ directory and back up the omni.ja file just in case something isn't working right with your modification. Note that I have found another omni.ja file under the browser folder in C:\Program Files\Pale Moon\. You don't want that one.

Now create a folder on your desktop where you will extract the omni.ja file to. Copy the omni.ja file on the desktop. Right click it and use Power Archiver to open the file. Chose extract and extract to your folder you created.

You should see several files. Navigate to, chrome\toolkit\content\global. Find the mozilla.xhtml file. Right click it and open with Notepad ++. Now you will see the text that you can modify to your choosing. Once finished, in Notepad ++ chose File | save.

Now we need to repack the files. Go into the folder and select all of the files. Make sure you select all of the files and you are not packing the folder that has the files. Once all of the files are highlighted right click and chose the context menu option with Power Archiver to compress as a Zip. Now rename the zip folder to omni.ja.

Place the modified omni.ja into your C:\Program Files\Pale Moon\ directory replacing the original (you do have a back up?)

Now open your browser and disable one extension. Close the browser and open again and reenable that extension. Apparently this has to be done to clear some kind of cache.

Now go to about:mozilla and you should see your new text. Here's mine:




Congrats!

EDIT-

Do note that when you update PM the omni.ja file will be overwritten. So you will have to make your edit again after update.

[Moonchild]

No, no, no no no.

Do not instruct people to hack omni.ja for this. I'll be moving this to a different board.

ANYONE FOLLOWING THESE INSTRUCTIONS WILL FORFEIT THEIR RIGHT TO SUPPORT.

[JustOff]

Here is the proper way to do this thing:

1. Create chrome.manifest file with the following content:

   Code: Select all

   content about-mozilla ./
   override chrome://global/content/mozilla.xhtml chrome://about-mozilla/content/mozilla.xhtml
   

2. Create install.rdf file:

   Code: Select all

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <RDF xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:em="http://www.mozilla.org/2004/em-rdf#">
     <Description about="urn:mozilla:install-manifest">
       <em:id>about-mozilla@i-am-hacker</em:id>
       <em:type>2</em:type>
       <em:name>about-mozilla</em:name>
       <em:version>1.0</em:version>
       <em:creator>i-am-hacker</em:creator>
       <em:description>about-mozilla</em:description>
       <em:targetApplication>
         <Description>
           <em:id>{8de7fcbb-c55c-4fbe-bfc5-fc555c87dbc4}</em:id>
           <em:minVersion>27.0.0</em:minVersion>
           <em:maxVersion>27.*</em:maxVersion>
         </Description>
       </em:targetApplication>
     </Description>
   </RDF>

3. Open chrome://global/content/mozilla.xhtml, save it to mozilla.xhtml and modify it as you like.
4. Zip these three files into about-mozilla-1.0.zip and rename it to about-mozilla-1.0.xpi.
5. Install about-mozilla-1.0.xpi into your browser.

PS: You should never ever edit omni.ja or any other parts of the browser distribution directly!