CCK

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CCK stands for Client Customization Kit.


History of Client Customization Kit (CCK)

CCK was born as the little brother of MCD in the 4.04 release of Communicator. (MCD is Mission Control Desktop - a set of tools aimed at enterprise control of Communicator on the desktop.) As such, CCK had to satisfy the demands of its target audience by simply making customization and distribution even possible.

The dialup component from the Navigator/Communicator Retail product is also included in CCK. Since CCK's focus has been primarily for ISPs and secondarily for other distributors, the dialup component has been necessary for its success.

In the 4.x releases, we attempted to "eat our own dogfood" as much as possible, so several of the tools were written using a combination of technologies introduced in the 4.x Communicator. Account Setup, Account Setup Editor, and Config Editor were all written using HTML, CSS, Layers, Javascript, LiveConnect, Java, Java Native Methods, Plugins, Security Layer, Signing, and other new stuff. While this was cool and interesting, it was also somewhat painful since the technology moved a lot faster than we could keep up with.

The results of that effort are available from mozilla.org via CVS by checking out the mozilla/cmd/dialup directory. The old Mac version is out there, but probably has problems since we had to hold back some stuff that wasn't legal to share and that seems to have broken things.

Along the way, the importance of distribution wasn't felt equally by all parts of our organization and the team working on these tools was made to shrink. We lost the ability to sustain the Mac platform and and also Win3.1. Hence our current situation where we've had to focus on getting a Win32 set of tools out quickly with a small number of people. (We could really use your help if you've read this far and you're interested in the Mac :-)

On the plus side, we're now totally focused on the CCK market and building tools explicitly for the needs of that market.



The Current Firefox CCK


Version 1.1 of the CCK Wizard has been released.

It's now available from addons.mozilla.org:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2553

This version adds support for Firefox 2.0. The changes made for Firefox 2.0 are:

  • Add support for putting a separator in bookmarks
    * Add support for reading OpenSearch files

Bugs can be reported here.

There is an FAQ page. If you have any questions or problems, please let me know and I can include them.

Please see the previous release notes for information on previous release changes.
Important trademark information

Note that trademark concerns only come into effect if you are distributing outside your organization or company.

A modification's trademark-acceptability is the same whether you use the CCK to make the modification or not. The CCK does not give a free pass, nor does it in any way encode what are and what are not allowed modifications.

You should consult the website to see what's acceptable and what's not.
For Distributors

The Firefox 1.5/2.0 CCK can be used to create an extension that customizes Firefox. It allows the following customizations:

  • Add identifer to the user agent string
    * Change the default home page and startup override home page
    * 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

IMPORTANT: ZIP.EXE MUST be available for the CCK to work. If it is not in your path, you can specify it in the CCK Wizard. Alternatively, you can install the MAF extension.

NOTE: If you add certificates to Firefox, you CANNOT ship a browser outside of your company or institution and call it Firefox. This feature is intended primarily for corporate and institutional users that will be deploying Firefox.

Once the CCK is installed, you will have a new menuitem in the Tools Menu called "CCK Wizard." This menuitem will invoke the wizard that walks you through the creation of an XPI file that can be used to customize Firefox 1.5/2.0.

If you want to make your CCK a part of the Firefox 2 installer, take a look at the Firefox Release Repackager. It is currently Mac only. We're working on that.

If you want to create an update site to update your CCK, check out this document.
For Developers