I would like to share a technique that I am using to customize WebRunner's behavior without directly changing the source code. In my AppRunner extension I have created an overlay for webrunner.xul and within the overlay I include my custom apprunner.js script. Today I decided that I want to modify the behavior of a function in the core WebRunner application object.

In webrunner.js there is a global WebRunner object which is defined like this:

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Today I created a simple extension for WebRunner. I believe that this will only work with the latest SVN version from svn.mozilla.org

To install, unzip the file into the extensions folder inside your webrunner profile. On Linux it's in ~/.webrunner/XXXX/extensions (Where XXXX is a randomly generated name)

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A while back I noticed a problem with using WebRunner on Google Docs and Spreadsheets. When you log in to docs.google.com you get an interface for browsing your documents, however, WebRunner launches any opened documents in an external browser window. This is not the desired behavior - I want my documents to open inside of WebRunner. it turns out to be fairly easy to fix this behavior in WebRunner so I modified the source to make documents load in the same window instead of launching Firefox. More...

This is a quick and dirty copy-paste hack to get Password Manager and "about:config" functionality in webrunner 0.5: More...

Tonight I threw together a Mac OS X package based on Mark Finkle's "WebRunner" code (Version 0.3.)

Everything looks good on my G4 PowerMac but I don't have any other environment to test this with. I believe that it requires XULRunner 1.8.1.3 XULRunner 1.9a7pre to be installed in the default location (/Library/Frameworks/XUL.Framework/) though another version might work.

I would appreciate any feedback on this as I have minimal experience with MacOS packaging. I intend to use this experience as the basis for a tutorial on MDC and the finished app bundle will make a nice example for other developers to learn from.

If you manage to test this please let me know whether it worked along with the versions of XULRunner and OS X that you tested. Thanks in advance for any feedback you can provide.

Update: I created an icon that you might like to use for webrunner, however, I can imagine using several instances of webrunner for several different webapps. In that case it would be really cool if there were a way to generate a custom version of the icon for each unique webrunner application. More on this idea later.....

Update 2: I am writing up an article with details of how this was done. You can read what I have so far over here on the Mozilla Developer Center wiki. More...