Cory Doctorow Could Use Mozilla Help
by Al
I mentioned the other day that writer, activist, and ne’erdowell , Cory Doctorow, wanted to release a theme and/or some kind of bundle alongside his next science fiction novel, Little Brother. This is a young adult novel focused on hacker kids and includes some supporting activities to help get kids more involved with the ideas within the book.
Cory has read part of Chapter 12 from the book previously and released it as a podcast. I include a link to the audio of that below.
Since I posted the other day, Cory and I have discussed what he’s trying to do in relation to Firefox and Tor in some detail. Within the book, he has a character using Tor to get around his school’s network restrictions to download a book. Cory wants, as an educational and promotional use together, to replicate this by making some kind of joint install of Tor (probably installing Vidalia) and Firefox available. Also, this would use a Firefox theme based on the book’s art. He also wants the Foxyproxy extension installed as well and configured to use Tor.
Simple, right? :-)
The issue here is that Cory is a Science Fiction writer, not a theme creator/artist or a Firefox guru. He could use some help from the community. Since much of his fan base are computer geeks who know of his work with the EFF and BoingBoing, I figure that might not be too hard to muster up but I do know it needs to be sought out. That’s why I’m posting here today.
I’m a QA guy and I’ve already volunteered my help to him but my skills and knowledge are limited here. I’m not sure what the best solution is to fulfill Cory’s relatively benign desires. I suggested to him that rolling a custom build of Firefox is not ideal as you’d want anyone who downloads this to get normal security updates and the like, which presupposes a normal build.
What I suggested, off the top of my head, is that someone could write an installer that grabs the current build of Firefox and the current build of Vidalia, installs theme, and then grabs his theme and FoxyProxy, configuring Firefox to use them. Maybe a zipfile with all of these could work though but grabbing the most current builds would be best since, in the last month, I know that Tor has released at least two updates and Firefox releases one every two months or so on average. The risk of installing out of date software is there otherwise. This gets around the idea of creating a custom Firefox build.
I’m not sure if this is the best solution but it is what occurred to me. If anyone in the community is interested in helping with this installation/configuration problem or has a good solution, please e-mail me through my gmail account (albill@gmail.com).
Also, beyond this, if anyone would be interested in helping with making a theme based on the artwork for Tor Books’ (the publisher) art department, that would be helpful and is a pretty self-contained issue.
Comments
Admit it — what Cory really wants is a “steampunk” theme! :-)
“someone could write an installer that grabs the current build of Firefox and the current build of Vidalia, installs theme, and then grabs his theme and FoxyProxy, configuring Firefox to use them. Maybe a zipfile with all of these could work though but grabbing the most current builds”
For things that MoCo has done like this (e.g. Kodak, Ebay) a “repack” is done – unpack the official build, copy the extension(s) into the extensions/ dir, then repackage the build.
As Firefox checks for updates, the “risk of installing outdated software” probably isn’t too terrible, but you can run into problems with installing the extension to the application directory (for example the extension manager does not make sure that the user is running as administrator).
I think it’d be easier to write a simple extension for Firefox 2 that is able to do what you describe; that is, download and install the latest version of the extensions into the user’s profile (so you won’t run into future update problems), and bundle that with the repack. I wouldn’t worry about a slightly out-of-date Firefox as it’ll update itself. If it’s a big enough concern, maybe this same extension could trigger the update check on startup?
In any case, Cory needs to talk to Mozilla if he wants to distribute anything but the standard build under the name “Firefox” (see http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/trademarks/policy.html). That’d probably be a good way to get advice on the right way to do this, as well.
Having gone through the process, I really think that a Firefox bundle with all that implies is total overkill in this case. Cory should do an extension bundle using CLEO (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2942) that includes his theme, FoxyProxy and whatever other extensions he wants to include.