Fun with Firefox Chrome URLs

Posted on December 23, 2005 by Ken

Firefox’s user interface is written using XUL and Javascript. The Gecko engine which renders the webpages also renders the user interface. This means you can enter chrome URLs into the Firefox address bar and do some really cool things.

I wouldn’t recommend trying out any of these "tricks" if you have any important websites open. Everything has been tested with Firefox 1.5 on Windows.

chrome://browser/content/browser.xul

This is awesome. Type this in the address bar and you can have a nested copy of Firefox running inside Firefox. You can even open up several tabs at this URL and have tabbed windows. You can even nest Firefox inside itself several times. Most things seem to work.

browser.xul

chrome://global/content/alerts/alert.xul

Notice: This will make your Firefox window disappear under the taskbar. Before loading this URL, make sure you have at least one other tab open. The Firefox window should do a crazy dance in the corner of the screen. If your Firefox window disappears, right click Firefox in the taskbar and select maximize. Press Control+W to stop Firefox from moving around.

chrome://browser/content/preferences/preferences.xul

Opens the Options window. In Firefox 1.0 use chrome://browser/content/pref/pref.xul

chrome://browser/content/bookmarks/bookmarksPanel.xul

Opens a list of your bookmarks.

chrome://browser/content/history/history-panel.xul

Opens a list of websites in your history.

chrome://global/content/console.xul

Opens the Javascript console.

chrome://mozapps/content/extensions/extensions.xul?type=extensions

Opens the Extensions window.

extensions

chrome://mozapps/content/extensions/extensions.xul

Opens the Themes window.

chrome://mozapps/content/profile/profileSelection.xul

Closes the current tab in Firefox; or the window if there is only one tab open.

chrome://global/content/finddialog.xul

Opens the old Firefox "Find" dialog (non functional)

chrome://global/content/printdialog.xul

Opens the Firefox Print dialog (non functional)

chrome://global/content/filepicker.xul

Seems to open a Linux style file picker on Windows for me. Non functional on Windows.

You can use the DOM Inspector and inspect windows to find cool URLs. Let me know if you find something neat.

21 thoughts on “Fun with Firefox Chrome URLs”

Tommy on March 30, 2006 at 12:43 pm said:

Nice find. This is also how Flock has the faves manager. I wonder could this be expanded to open an RSS reader.

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Wayne Newston on July 3, 2006 at 5:22 am said:

Thanks for the info, will definetely use this to impress the friends!

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Georgemoney on July 28, 2006 at 9:41 pm said:

Like you, I’ve also been interested in chrome:// urls, and when I found how to unzip a jar file, I found all these chrome urls that you can put up

I also suggest that you put "if you want to open the chrome in it’s own window like a program instead of as a firefox page, open FF with -chrome "chrome://url" after the path to the file (windows)" on your blog

Here are the links:

chrome://browser/content/aboutDialog.xul
chrome://browser/content/credits.xhtml – which is a scrolling list of names
chrome://browser/content/metaData.xul
chrome://browser/content/openLocation.xul
chrome://browser/content/pageInfo.xul
chrome://browser/content/pageReport.xul
chrome://browser/content/pageReportFirstTime.xul
chrome://browser/content/safeMode.xul
chrome://browser/content/sanitize.xul
chrome://browser/content/searchDialog.xul
chrome://browser/content/setDesktopBackground.xul
chrome://browser/content/viewSourceOverlay.xul – not really anything special
chrome://browser/content/bookmarks/addBookmark2.xul
chrome://browser/content/bookmarks/addBookmark.xul
chrome://browser/content/bookmarks/bookmarksManager.xul
chrome://browser/content/bookmarks/bookmarksPanel.xul
chrome://browser/content/bookmarks/bookmarksProperties.xul
chrome://browser/content/bookmarks/selectBookmark.xul
chrome://browser/content/history/history-panel.xul
chrome://browser/content/migration/migration.xul
chrome://browser/content/preferences/advanced-scripts.xul
chrome://browser/content/preferences/changeaction.xul
chrome://browser/content/preferences/colors.xul
chrome://browser/content/preferences/connection.xul
chrome://browser/content/preferences/cookies.xul
chrome://browser/content/preferences/downloadactions.xul
chrome://browser/content/preferences/fonts.xul
chrome://browser/content/preferences/languages.xul
chrome://browser/content/preferences/permissions.xul
chrome://browser/content/preferences/preferences.xul
chrome://browser/content/preferences/sanitize.xul

BTW, I got those out of c:\program files\mozilla firefox\chrome\browser.jar

Also, there is a whole ton of chrome in toolkit.jar in the same directory as browser.jar. I am to lazy to list them all. If you want to go to toolkit.jar and list them, I will tell you how to unzip a jar file if you don’t know how. Rename the .jar to .zip and you’re done

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Khlo on July 28, 2006 at 9:55 pm said:

Fixed the line breaks in the above comment.

Thanks for the info!

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Kurdt on August 17, 2006 at 6:30 pm said:

Nice WOrk !

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Tux3 on May 16, 2007 at 3:28 pm said:

Me entero de esto al tratar de cargar un agregado en Firefox a travez de Synaptic. Luego de resetear la PC leo un cartelito que menciona que el agregado inteligente no se pudo cargar por no estar registrado en Chrome. Adems que avise en la pgina del autor. Uso Xubuntu 6.06.1 con Firefox y Thunderbird con atualizaciones antiguas. No consigo el 2.03 de Firefox y el 2.0 de Thunderbird sucesivamente. Gracias.

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Manu on May 9, 2007 at 10:30 am said:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Dev_:_Firefox_Chrome_URLs

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Michael Sync on September 23, 2007 at 9:21 am said:

Thanks… I like it..

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Stevnewb on November 1, 2007 at 5:58 pm said:

stevnewb@comcast.net

Anti Firefox Virus

I need some feedback from other Firefox users on the Comcast access to internet.

I’ve picked up some kind of disabling virus which prevent Firefox from reaching

ANY servers, and I don’t know how to get rid of it.

HELLLLLLP!

stevnewb

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Dwight Stegall on January 31, 2008 at 8:06 pm said:

I haven’t been able to find any info on the web on how to unlock the
Flock Browser sidebar so I could load my favorites in there like you
can in Firefox 2 and Netscape 9.

So I opened about:config and there it was plain as day.

flock.favorites.loadPageInSide
bar set to true

Now when you right-click a favorite and click on properties the "Load
this bookmark in the sidebar" is there with a checkbox. It was there
all the time, but turned off.

I loaded these two in the sidebar.

chrome://mozapps/content/downloads/downloads.xul
chrome://mozapps/content/extensions/extensions.xul

In Netscape 9 and Firefox 2 you can easily extend the width of the
sidebar to full screen width. This doesn’t help in Flock

#sidebar {max-width:none !important;}

So for now we are still stuck with max-width:400px;

Don’t try to load AllInOneSidebar into Flock or Flock will freeze and
you will have to go into the Safe Mode to uninstall it.

One of the things I load in the sidebar is http://www.google.com/ie

Dwight Stegall
East Moline, Illinois, USA

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zach on July 22, 2008 at 10:56 pm said:

Great!
Thank you for the info.

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timekeeper on August 29, 2008 at 1:46 pm said:

is there a way to create hyperlinks that utilize these. I am looking to use the IETabs automatically for certain links and find that if i use

Link

it does not work.

Any guidance is appreciated. thanks

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Überadri on September 2, 2008 at 6:27 pm said:

@ timekeeper:
IE Tab – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1419
Set up filters or addresses for sites to be IE-rendered

And, I agree with some Digg-user:
“some one should make an EXT that lets you easily open and manege sub tabs because now you cant really close them or open bookmarks to them…”

chrome://browser/content/browser.xul loads double toolbars and fucks up important shortcuts (ctrl+l for instance), someone should make a proper SubTabs addon!

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FirefoxvsChrome on September 8, 2008 at 11:50 am said:

I like the alert.xul It made my firefox do some crazy stuff.

By the way how can you enter chrome into earlier firefox versions when chrome wasn’t even released?

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PISSED OFF USER on October 10, 2008 at 5:52 pm said:

Im pissed about the new garbage adress bar…..

FIREFOX children need to be fired, and get REAL people doing it.

The “Page Title” BS in the “Universal Resource Locator” BOX SUCKS!!!!!

CLOGS UP THE LIST…. LOOKS LIKE SHIT!!!

MAKES IT HARD TO SEE THE SITE YOU WANT!!!

TO HELL WITH FIREFOX…..

Im trying to find how to remove it, and this is one of the site I come up with….

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Jane on October 18, 2008 at 2:32 pm said:

I love a couple of things about Chrome. Mostly being about to click the ‘new tab’ and have the default page of most visited sites. That’s very handy.
Unfortunately there are too many things that aren’t quite ready yet in Chrome (like not being about to turn off the question about reloading forms when returning to a previous page and not being able to select text on some pages etc. etc.)

Is there a way to get that cool ‘most visited’ page on Firefox?

Love your blog.

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LiquidFire on October 20, 2008 at 10:19 am said:

@Firefoxvschrome and @Jane:

This has nothing to do with Google Chrome. The word “chrome” refers to the graphical user interface of a program. See this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_interface_chrome#User_Interface_and_Interaction_Design

Google just named their browser the same way for some reason, apparently causing confusion for you.

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djrocks on July 27, 2009 at 5:10 am said:

I am looking for a javascript code that creates a firefox extension to create a bookmark
and get the url address of the current webpage.

Can anyone know about that?

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Sudip Saha on September 27, 2011 at 1:39 am said:

i say that when i exit my browser and download continue,,please help me..how is that possible?

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P Sreelatha on March 18, 2013 at 11:16 am said:

I am trying to open that from Firefox mozilla, 19.0.2.
I am getting file not found error.

Does that pippki package exist at all??

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P Sreelatha on March 18, 2013 at 11:18 am said:

chrome://pippki/content/cipherinfo.xul trying to open this from firefox 19.0.2.
Getting file not found error….
Thanks for the help in advance..

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Writer & Developer. This is my personal blog.