FF 13.0.1 Questions

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justusiv
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FF 13.0.1 Questions

Post by justusiv » Tue Jul 03, 2012 4:28 pm

I have two questions that come to mind.
First is there a way to bypass FF asking to import stuff from IE when deployed? I don't want my users to do that.
Second is there a way to change the location of the default profile that Mozilla uses? It currently sits in user\appdata\roaming\mozilla\firefox\profiles\XXX.default
The main reason for this is i want there bookmarks on a secured location.

Thank you

MonkeyBoy
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Re: FF 13.0.1 Questions

Post by MonkeyBoy » Thu Jul 05, 2012 11:29 am

I believe if you create an administrative install point for the MSI that you can change the default installation of Firefox, which should allow you to skip the import step... though I've never tried. Note that if the profile already exists when Firefox is opened for the first time it won't prompt you to import anything, because it won't be creating a new profile, it'll just be using the existing profile.

The only way I know to move Firefox's profiles around is through junction points (symbolic links) which would allow you to move them anywhere that the user's account can reach, even if it sits on a network server. You would move the profile folder to the destination location, delete the profile folder in roaming, then create a junction point in it's place. To an application a junction point IS the file/folder that it's replaced, most older tools don't even show them as junction points.

Personally my installs are on public multiple-user shared-user-account systems, and to avoid users changing their home page to porn and similar nonsense I have master profiles sitting on a network server which get synched over the local profile every time the system is rebooted (there's additional security in place to prevent them from futzing with things but, kids being kids, they'd rather waste dozens of hours working around security blocks than actually doing homework, so this just my failsafe catch-all).

You could adopt a similar system, where a master profile gets copied to your secure location when the user logs on for the first time (all users can't share the same profile, so it needs to be copied so each user can have their own folder), then it creates the necessary local files in the roaming profile, then sets a registry key in the user's profile that you check before running the aforementioned procedure.

jpa
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Re: FF 13.0.1 Questions

Post by jpa » Thu Jul 05, 2012 4:41 pm

justusiv wrote:First is there a way to bypass FF asking to import stuff from IE when deployed?
Yes, but not easily with the Frontmotion MSI installer.

From https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=286557#c38

conclusion: to disable profile migration on browser first run or on creation of
new profile, place a file called override.ini in your Mozilla install directory the contents of which read: (copy
everything between the lines, excluding the lines.)
----------------------------------------
[XRE]
EnableProfileMigrator=false
----------------------------------------

Unless you can edit the MSI to add this file you'll need to script up something to deploy it.

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DraconPern
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Re: FF 13.0.1 Questions

Post by DraconPern » Thu Jul 05, 2012 5:29 pm

FrontMotion Lead Developer

justusiv
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Re: FF 13.0.1 Questions

Post by justusiv » Fri Jul 06, 2012 10:50 am

The added override.ini is working great.... thx for the tip...
As for the bookmark issue i think we have decided to just backup the places.sqlite file on all profiles via powershell.
We don't really want the whole profile running off the network and the really only visible thing to the users if it was gone would be the bookmarks.
We still want our users to be able to use the bookmarks so having a master profile doesn't work in our scenario. But thinks for throwing out some ideas.

Thanks



*EDIT*
I figured out how to turn on the bookmarks.html file by hand by editing the about:config browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML. How could i do this for the install package?

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DraconPern
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Re: FF 13.0.1 Questions

Post by DraconPern » Fri Jul 06, 2012 11:00 pm

You can create an admin install, and edit mozilla.cfg and put your settings there. Then push your install from the administrative install point.
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scopsm
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Re: FF 13.0.1 Questions

Post by scopsm » Tue Oct 23, 2012 9:35 am

Hi,

We have deployed Firefox 13.0.1 using FrontMotion MSI to all workstations.

We have standard prefs.js which we copy to the location:
%appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\profiles\default\prefs.js where %appdata% is the user's roaming profile location.
Also, every user has the file %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\profiles.ini which has the line:
[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=Profiles/default

Then we deploy Firefox 13.0.1 using FrontMotion MSI.

The issue I now have is that I want to change the downloads location so that it is not the default which is c:\users\username\downloads.
I want to change this to h:\my documents.
The setting that is changed in %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\profiles\default\prefs.js when you change this manually in Firefox via Tools Options and Save files to H:\my documents is: user_pref("browser.download.dir", "H:\\My Documents");

However, if I first edit the existing prefs.js file manually (%appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\profiles\default\prefs.js) so that this line is added, Firefox 13.0.1 doesn't pick up the change.

Any ideas why Firefox 13.0.1 isn't picking up the change in the modified prefs.js?

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