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How can I define a default firefox profile name for multiple users so we can make Ivanti Environment Manager work?

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  • Last reply by EkilErif

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Our company offers users the choice of Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge or Mozilla Firefox (60.3 ESR) for web browsing. Our users make use of non-persistent Virtual Desktop Infrastructure which means that each day they get a new desktop. We use a product called Ivanti Environment Manager to retain personal settings across sessions so that things like bookmarks, etc. to persist across sessions.

This product stores settings within a Microsoft SQL database and recommendation from the vendor of that application is only to keep what is necessary across sessions. This is great, we have a list of files and folders within the Firefox profile that we want to roam and some we don't.

Unfortunately this product cannot support wildcards in a folder path so users Firefox profiles are proving to cause a few issues. For example, my profile is C:\Users\Richard\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\i99zcqad.default. What we are looking to do is to have everyone's profile called something like Firefox.default so that we can configure exclusions knowing the profile name will be consistent.

Is there a method anywhere within Firefox where we could do this? Our current solution is a messy one to use a powershell script to find the profile name, rename it and then update the profiles.ini file with the new name but my worry is that some of the underlying sqllite files may face issues as a result of this.

Any suggestions are highly appreciated?

Thanks, Richard

Our company offers users the choice of Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge or Mozilla Firefox (60.3 ESR) for web browsing. Our users make use of non-persistent Virtual Desktop Infrastructure which means that each day they get a new desktop. We use a product called Ivanti Environment Manager to retain personal settings across sessions so that things like bookmarks, etc. to persist across sessions. This product stores settings within a Microsoft SQL database and recommendation from the vendor of that application is only to keep what is necessary across sessions. This is great, we have a list of files and folders within the Firefox profile that we want to roam and some we don't. Unfortunately this product cannot support wildcards in a folder path so users Firefox profiles are proving to cause a few issues. For example, my profile is C:\Users\Richard\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\i99zcqad.default. What we are looking to do is to have everyone's profile called something like Firefox.default so that we can configure exclusions knowing the profile name will be consistent. Is there a method anywhere within Firefox where we could do this? Our current solution is a messy one to use a powershell script to find the profile name, rename it and then update the profiles.ini file with the new name but my worry is that some of the underlying sqllite files may face issues as a result of this. Any suggestions are highly appreciated? Thanks, Richard

Modified by Roland Tanglao

Chosen solution

Your modification of the profile path should have no adverse effects.

Another option (for a new user) is to use the command:

firefox -CreateProfile "JoelUser c:\internet\joelusers-moz-profile"

And then when you subsequently start Firefox, it will use that profile.

See:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Command_Line_Options#-CreateProfile_.22profile_name_profile_dir.22

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Chosen Solution

Your modification of the profile path should have no adverse effects.

Another option (for a new user) is to use the command:

firefox -CreateProfile "JoelUser c:\internet\joelusers-moz-profile"

And then when you subsequently start Firefox, it will use that profile.

See:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Command_Line_Options#-CreateProfile_.22profile_name_profile_dir.22

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Thanks Mike.

I will add a configuration into my environment to use -createprofile for new users and then use the path modification for existing users. Should cover both scenarios off there.