Boundary Conditions

I’m writing more Javascript and AJAX these days, so not coincidentally, I am also spending more time:

• Inspecting the DOM of pages.
• Checking the validity of CSS and XHTML.
• Checking for Javascript syntax errors.
• Breakpointing Javascript.
• Viewing the rendered source of pages.

On top of that, there are a number of other tasks that I do frequently as I develop for the web:

• Measuring page load time.
• Snoop on, and alter, http requests and responses.
• Clear and/or disable the cache.
• Clear all or selected cookies.
• Spoof a site as a different browser.

For all of these tasks, Firefox is the browser for me. There are useful tools for Safari, Internet Explorer and, I assume, Google Chrome, but Firefox with the Firebug, DOM Inspector, Live HTTP Headers, Tamper Data, User Agent Switcher, View Source Chart, Web Developer and YSlow plugins is the set of tools that I am the most comfortable using for these tasks.

The problem usually is that I don’t really want all of these extensions around when I am focused on reading or casually surfing the web. This morning, it occurred to me that I could use the techniques that I used in creating Firefoxen to create a special purpose web application development browser.

A few minutes later:

Here is what I did.

# Make a copy of Firefox
cp -pr /Applications/Firefox3.app /Applications/WebFox.app
 
# Create a new profile, I called mine WebFox
WebFox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -P
 
# I used my existing profile as a baseline, you might not want to
cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/
rm -fr 40of1s4x.WebFox/
cp -pr u5qu37ob.default 40of1s4x.WebFox
 
# Change the Bundle Name to "WebFox"
open /Applications/WebFox.app/Contents/Info.plist 
 
# Change launch-ff command to (no quotes) 
# "/Applications/WebFox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -P WebFox"
vi /Applications/WebFox.app/Contents/MacOS/launch-ff 
 
# CFBundleName is WebFox for display in the tool bar
# You probably need the Developer Tools installed for this to work
open /Applications/WebFox.app/Contents/Resources/en.lproj/InfoPlist.strings

Here’s the gist, if you roll that way.

Once you’ve done all that, then you can WebFox (open -a WebFox, or clicking) and modify the extensions to suit your way of working.

That’s it. How it helps someone.