This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Firefox profile location with Firefox GPO settings defined

  • 4 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 620 views
  • Last reply by john467

more options

We currently use roaming profiles at our site on our Windows 10 computers. Firefox profile data is created in %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox for our users (which falls in our redirected AppData location and therefore is written to our fileserver).

I am looking at implementing some Firefox settings in Group Policy to control certain settings for our users, but I find when I make settings there, profile data lands in %localappdata%\Mozilla\Firefox instead, and this data is *NOT* saved to the fileserver.

Is there a setting in the Firefox ADMX package that allows one to redefine where the Firefox profile data is created? I've looked through the settings in version 2.3 of the Firefox ADMX package, and I'm not finding it.

We currently use roaming profiles at our site on our Windows 10 computers. Firefox profile data is created in %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox for our users (which falls in our redirected AppData location and therefore is written to our fileserver). I am looking at implementing some Firefox settings in Group Policy to control certain settings for our users, but I find when I make settings there, profile data lands in %localappdata%\Mozilla\Firefox instead, and this data is *NOT* saved to the fileserver. Is there a setting in the Firefox ADMX package that allows one to redefine where the Firefox profile data is created? I've looked through the settings in version 2.3 of the Firefox ADMX package, and I'm not finding it.

Chosen solution

Any profile data that is needs to be persistent for a user is stored in %appdata%. All of the data in %localappdata% are things that are temporary (cache and things like that).

We don't currently have a way to put all profile information to a specific path, but if you modify profiles.ini to point to a specific path, all profile data will go there.

You can also start Firefox with -profile "profile_path" and it will put all profile data there. See:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Command_Line_Options

What specific data were you seeing in a different location by setting Group Policy? It doesn't change the location of any data.

Read this answer in context 👍 1

All Replies (4)

more options

Chosen Solution

Any profile data that is needs to be persistent for a user is stored in %appdata%. All of the data in %localappdata% are things that are temporary (cache and things like that).

We don't currently have a way to put all profile information to a specific path, but if you modify profiles.ini to point to a specific path, all profile data will go there.

You can also start Firefox with -profile "profile_path" and it will put all profile data there. See:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Command_Line_Options

What specific data were you seeing in a different location by setting Group Policy? It doesn't change the location of any data.

more options

My apologies here...I was looking in the wrong place due to some folder redirection policies that I didn't think were in effect for the user I was testing with. Bookmarks data does appear to be logging to the correct location.

One oddity I found: I have a GPO set up to configure a default home page and disable automatic updates, and I have verified registry keys were created as expected under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Mozilla\Firefox. To test, I removed all Mozilla directories under %appdata% and %localappdata% and restarted Firefox. The first time Firefox starts does not get the default home page I configured. Subsequent restarts of the Firefox browser brought up the desired home page as expected.

Thank you for your time. Again, apologies for not paying closer attention to this issue.

more options

I'm wondering if you're actually seeing the first run page (which we use as the homepage).


Try setting this value to empty:

https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/master/README.md#overridefirstrunpage

more options

That indeed was it. I missed that particular setting when configuring the GPO the first time.

Thank you for your time!