Deploying Firefox 7 with default user preferences?
I am having a hard time locating documentation for deploying Firefox with default user preferences (such as disabling automatic updates, setting a homepage, etc.). I located information for previous versions which mention of adding a user.js file to the defaults/pref folder. But this doesn't seem to work.
What is the proper way (if one exists) to customize Firefox for deployment in an enterprise scenario?
All Replies (7)
Take a look here in the Docs I just searched Deploying Firefox 7 and got this.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q=Deploying+Firefox+7
See also:
- https://wiki.mozilla.org/Deployment:Deploying_Firefox
- http://www.frontmotion.com/Firefox/howtodeploy.htm
You can initialize a profile by creating a defaults\profile folder in the Firefox program folder (C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\) and place files like a user.js or a bookmarks.html file in it.
You can use a mozilla.cfg file in the Firefox program folder to lock prefs or specify default values.
Place a file local-settings.js in the defaults\pref folder where you also find the file channel-prefs.js to specify using mozilla.cfg.
pref("general.config.filename", "mozilla.cfg");
pref("general.config.obscure_value", 0); // use this to disable the byte-shift
See:
You can use these functions in mozilla.cfg:
defaultPref(); // set new default value pref(); // set pref, but allow changes in current session lockPref(); // lock pref, disallow changes
The locking preferences doc briefly mentions local-settings.js. I think that might be what I was missing. Still, it sames there is a real lack of documentation on local-settings.js. The document also seems to shift back and forth about all.js and local-settings.js which is quite confusing...
Things have changed a bit since all files were moved to the omni.jar ZIP archive and all empty folders have been removed and need to be recreated if you want to use them. The use of all.js was needed in very old Firefox 1 and 2 (?) versions and is no longer needed and has been replaced by a file local-settings.js in the pref folder (should work in Firefox 3 and later).
local-settings.js doesn't seem to work for Firefox 7.01 - adding user preferences there causes no changes to a new profile. Even default\profile doesn't seem to work - the basic settings like homepage, network etc just end up in a file invalidprefs.js in the newly created profile, and the hostperms.1 file isn't recreated in the user's new profile.
Does anyone have any other suggestions?
Make sure that you use a file user.js in the default\profile folder to initialize prefs if you do not want to use local-settings.js
You can't do that with a file prefs.js in that case.
You can only place pref calls like pref("general.config.filename", "mozilla.cfg"); in local-settings.js and not user_pref() calls.
So if you use the latter then that explains the failure.
And people wonder why FireFox hasn't made much of a dent in the enterprise. This says it all......