XUL tricks

Looking at Mozilla's Components

Using Mozilla (or any other Gecko-based browser) it is possible to look at the components of Mozilla by entering the component's specification into the URL widget.

(Note: The following directions work under Linux with Mozilla 1.0.1 installed. If you're using different software, then you'll have to adjust accordingly.)

cd /usr/lib/mozilla-1.0.1/chrome; ls *.jar

You'll see the packages that make up Mozilla. You can use the

unzip -l

command to see the files that make up these packages. For example:

unzip -l some-jar-file | grep "xul$"

spits out a list of the form

    some-size  some-date some-time   content/some-component/some-xul-file

To see the page that this file describes, point your browser to

chrome://some-component/content/some-xul-file

You can even stick the browser window inside the browser window by entering:

chrome://navigator/content/navigator.xul

And then, of course, you can put a browser window inside of that one, and another browser inside of that one, and so on, and so forth.

Launching Mozilla without its Chrome

You can launch a Mozilla application without bothering to install it in the chrome directory by supplying the URL on the command line.

mozilla -chrome http://www2.axian.com/~ali/xul/top.xul

mozilla -chrome file:///home/ali/xul/top.xul