Recently, I’m surveying how to deploy Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird with it’s update channel, but it’s very hard to use for un-official builders like me.

Generally speaking, Firefox will try to send HTTP request to mozilla official site with some client information. For example, a nightly BonEcho will try to get document from this URL.

AS you see, Firefox try to send some information like Firefox version, host architecture, host OS version and so on, and to get server response through SSL (in fact, it’s TLSv1). Of course, you can use any browser to see what the corresponding response is by this URL.

Then Firefox can get type “complete” of patch tag, fetching the .mar file at mozilla official FTP site, and performing update procedure.

Everything seems great, doesn’t it? Not exactly. It means that the Firefox updater program only support .mar file format, not gz, bzip2 format — the common compression we’ve known. Consequently I must have enough knowledge to know how to pack .mar archive as well.

Hence, I create a project called mar hosting on Google Code (Brief introduction on ijliao’s blog). I hope these simple tool s could create, extract, and view the mozilla archive more easy.

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