Deploy Firefox with prebuilt bookmarks and homepage
We're deploying Firefox during the SCCM2012 imaging process on our company's win7 and 8 64bit machines. Unfortunately, the nature of Firefox's randomized user profile names and non-use of a "Default User" makes it impossible for us to build/deploy a tailored Firefox with our desired homepage and bookmarks. I understand older versions (3.x) of Firefox could make use of a default folder in it's program directory (C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\defaults) for bookmark deployment, upon which, every new Firefox profile created would use it's bookmark.html or js file to build predetermined bookmarks for that user. But this doesn't seem to be the case with the newer version of FF. I could see us building the environment in IE perhaps, and then instructing our users to use the import IE favorites, etc upon their first launch of Firefox? Kinda lame, if even possible. And yes, we could probably deploy a post-deployment package to overwrite (or merge as i've seen an article address) a user's Firefox profile, but that's really undesirable for numerous reasons. Is there no way to do this?
THANKS.
Wšykne wótegrona (8)
hello jackalfb, hopefully the following blog entry can provide some assistance: http://mike.kaply.com/2012/03/30/customizing-firefox-default-profiles/
You can also look at this extension:
- CCK Wizard: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/cck/
Thanks for the response. I had seen the article, but it didn't quite click until i looked over them more. For others facing similar goals:
Following http://mike.kaply.com/2012/03/30/customizing-firefox-default-profiles/
-I extracted the contents of the omni.ja file in the Firefox app folder (change the extension to zip from ja or whatever). I then injected my bookmarks.html file into the default one that existed.
-attempting to overwrite the localstore.rdf and prefs.js files to change the homepage and toolbar layouts etc DID NOT work as suggested in the article, at least for me in Firefox 20. To change the default homepage and a few other things (like disabling the migration wizard etc) I followed this article http://www.mockbox.net/configmgr-sccm/174-install-and-configure-firefox-silently.
Thanks, good luck.
^also, to convert my extracted omni.ja files back into the omni.ja, you zip all the contents (with you modified bookmarks.html file etc) and change the extension back to ja from zip.
You may also wish to consider using Firefox ESR (Currently fx 17). Maybe also consider evaluating Beta channel on some machines.
Thousands of Corporate machines were left with a none functional Firefox until the Firefox 20.0.1 release was rushed out.
the omnia.ja file will be overwritten with every firefox update, so i'm not sure if this is the best way to proceed...
good point. but in our environment it shouldn't be an issue; i assume that would only affect new profiles that were to be created on the machine after the FF update. which is fine, since FF is first launched by the machine's only owner. So any automatic update pulled by FF thereafter should be irrelevant.