Open Bug 1549199 Opened 5 years ago Updated 2 years ago

Support easier making of custom Firefox bundles

Categories

(Firefox Build System :: General, enhancement)

Product:
Firefox Build System
Component:
General
Version:
68 Branch
Type:
enhancement

Tracking

(Not tracked)

People

(Reporter: filip.stamcar, Unassigned)

Details

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0

Expected results:

There should be a support for making custom Firefox bundles.

Currently, if you want to create your own browser, the only simple way is to use Electron, which is based on Chromium. And the only way to make custom Firefox browser is with modifying installer, but this is very complicated and it does not support so much configuration.

This is why there are many new "browsers" that uses Electron, like Brave, Beaker and others. It will be better to enable something like this also in Firefox.

There should be some way to quickly make customized Firefox bundles. There should be a support to:

  • Change browser's branding (name, description, logo...), installation directory and other related things.
  • Change some settings.
  • Bundle extensions and some code. This would enable some custom additional functionalities.
  • Bundle additional third-party programs (in C/C++, Rust, Python, Node.js). This would be useful if the browser would be made for some custom protocol that requires an additional built-in client.

There should also be support for easy managing updates of that custom browser.

It should be possible to do this on all platforms (Windows, macOS, Linux, Android...).

With that support, developers would be able to make their own browser. So this could be a good alternative for Electron.

Type: defect → enhancement

This seems like a great idea, I'm not sure if this is the correct component for it but maybe our devs can move it to a more suitable one. Thanks Filip for reporting this issue/enhancement.

Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Component: Untriaged → General
Ever confirmed: true
Product: Firefox → Firefox Build System

I think that this feature should be available as fast as possible.
Recent Google's ad block ban could encourage some browsers to switch engine. And if Firefox will be ready for embedding, they could switch to it.

Severity: normal → S3
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