Firefox 061308

I love learning new things. Seriously. Knowledge is power. Here is the error message we get when trying to launch Firefox.
XULRunner: Couldn't read application.ini

In order to solve this problem we need to know what XULRunner is. According to Wikipedia XULRunner is a runtime environment developed by the Mozilla Foundation that provides a common back-end for XUL applications, like Firefox. The current stable release is 1.8. According to the Mozilla Wiki , XULRunner continues to improve on the Mozilla 1.9 codebase. Firefox 3 is built on top of a "private" XULRunner, i.e. XULRunner is installed in the Firefox application directory. The Firefox 3 executable has a -app switch to load a different XULRunner application.

On Windows, XULRunner does not yet have a built-in installation solution; app developers should use pre-existing solutions for a native Windows installer. The installed files should be arranged in the following directory structure:

§ installdir/

§ application.ini

§ components/

§ ... components which are part of the application

§ chrome/

§ ... chrome which is part of the application

§ ... additional application files such as icons, etc

§ myapplicationname.exe (This is the "stub executable"... you should copy and rename this file from xulrunner-stub.exe in your XULRunner installation.)

§ xulrunner/

§ ... copy xulrunner/ to this directory

At this point I have a few concerns. Could the fact that we didn't uninstall our current version of Firefox be the cause of this? Is there a conflict between the current XULRunner and the "private" XULRunner packaged with Firefox3?

I reviewed the Known Issues of RC2, and the first bullet states, "Installing Firefox 2 in the same directory in which Firefox 3 has been installed may result in Firefox 2 being unstable."

Maria and I checked and we cannot locate the application.ini file. Next I want to associate the application object to a user that does not pick up Firefox 1.0.6. If RC2 distributes and launches OK then we will need to create an uninstaller for 1.0.6. This could be tricky because we allowed staff users to upgrade to Firefox 2.X.

Maria uninstalled both versions of Firefox and deleted the installation folder. She then manually installed RC2. Firefox 3 RC2 launched OK. We searched for the application.ini file and it was where it is supposed to be in the target folder. C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox. We looked at the application files from the snapshot and don't see the application.ini file in the application object for RC2.

I Manually added application.ini to the application object for RC2. Bumped up the version number and deployed it without any problems.

At this point there is a prompt to import settings from Internet Explorer or not. We chose not to. Then you are asked if you want to make Firefox your default browser. We chose to do this. Two tabs are now available one for the Firefox 3 RC2 Welcome screen and the other is the Mozilla Firefox Start Page. This is a great place to stop for today. We will probably continue to test the deployment of the object before we make anymore changes. The final package for the staff should be straight forward without any prompts. RC2 does have issues with previous add-ons working. This should be considered if we were to deploy RC2 for staff familiarity.

The deployment packages will default to the ACPL home page and I would like to see if we can add our catalog to the search bar.