I need to be able to lock my home page from IT intrusions
Our IT department has some kind of script to reset our setting every time the computer reboots. That includes the Home page. I switched to Firefox because they were doing it on IE. Now they found a way to do it on Firefox too.. My home page contains all my links, organized a certain way to be efficient. I need a way to either prevent them from changing my home page, or some way to undo their damage automatically at startup. Can you help? A good start would be to know in what file the homepage is located. Maybe I can make it write-protected, or keep a good copy of it, and rewrite it periodically... Thanks in advance.
== IT figured out a way to change the homepage on Firefox
All Replies (5)
Hello dhrm77.
First of all, and although possibly not related to your problem, I will remind you that the version of Firefox you are using at the moment has been discontinued and is no longer supported. Furthermore, it has known bugs and security problems. I urge you to update to the latest version of Firefox, for maximum stability, performance, security and usability. You can get it for free, as always, at getfirefox.com.
As for your question, you may want to store your homepage in a bookmark, and use it from there. It's certainly more trouble-free than going into your profile folder and change a file every time.
OR, you may want to play around a bit with your use profile (managing profiles). Maybe it you create a different profile for Firefox and you have it selected when you shut down your PC, maybe their software won't change the settings on your real profile. Just an idea, I don't know if it'll work.
In addition to Morbus' solution, if you're allowed to have shortcuts unchanged on your desktop/toolbar/whereever you start Firefox from, you could just save the link to your home page on the desktop as any other URL shortcut and call it something - like "My start page" - and use that for launching Firefox every time.
Hi, The latest version of Firefox is driving me nuts and my problem may be related to this thread?
How can I lock my home page? It keeps resetting itself onto random pages from emails and using them as my default page.
It dosen’t seem to matter what I do to my settings it just does its own thing.
I tried setting this file - Prefs.js – to read only, but to no avail.
Thanks, Dave
Dave Swanepoel, this sounds like you have a virus/trojan/spyware.
I finally got an answer for my problem. The IT people had made an artificial setting in the registry for the home page, and are running a script at every boot to copy that setting into pref.js. All I had to do was change the registry setting, until they change their script again, in an attempt to reinforce counter-productivity.
Morbus, about the upgrade. I don't know if it is because of one of the counter-productive measures of the IT department, or not, but the automated updates always fail to install. And for now, I am too busy and I don't care enough to do it manually.