Hi all, FYI, I'm a noob with respect to Firefox ESR/Enterprise and this mailing list. So please bear with me as I try to learn how to manage Firefox in the enterprise hopefully the 'proper' way compared to the way we've always handled it in our environment.
My background is an admin for classroom podium computers and computer labs at my university. In an educational setting we try to offer as much as we can to faculty, staff, and students for maximum teaching potential and user choice. We've always included the most recent versions both Firefox and Chrome consumer browsers baked in our images (mainly because I think the enterprise versions didn't exist when we first started down this path). In our environment we run Windows 7/10, domain-joined, don't use roaming profiles, and customize the Windows default user profile via sysprep's audit mode. We also use a disk reboot-to-restore product called Deep Freeze which basically means that every user login is a "new/fresh" login after every boot or restart. We've always customized all the browsers and let these customizations be part of the aforementioned default user profile that then propagate into the new user's Windows profile. However, I'd like to get away from doing it this way and deploy the additional browsers as silent install packages after Windows has been deployed. Most of our browser customizations involve making the user experience as best as possible given our static "locked" lab environment. We disable first-run items, reminders or annoyances and anything date-based like scheduled tasks and such that that like to periodically 'clean up' things (including disabling Firefox's "it looks like you haven't started Firefox in a while"), etc. We also customize home pages, bookmarks, popup blocker exception site lists, etc. depending on the department or situation that's requesting it. For Firefox, some of this is done in a scripted fashion during initial deployment while other things are handled via group policy/GPO (either login scripts that modify browser profile files that contain such settings or just overwriting them with a server copy). Recently I've learned that with the Chrome browser I don't need to go this route of duplicating an entire browser profile anymore. Chrome seems to support configuring all or most of the settings I need customizing using either GPOs and/or a 'master preferences' file. These settings get picked at user's first launch of the browser and a fresh browser's profile gets built around it. So I'm looking to do the same thing above with Firefox. I'm sure it can be done. I'd like to get away our 'big' 15-20MB Firefox default user profile just to replicate the custom settings we want. But there's a lot of old or outdated information out there and I don't know where to start. For example, some tips are specific to older versions since things like file paths/names and preference names change over time. Can anyone point me to any good guides/pages that cover these enterprise management tasks that would still be relative to the most recent versions of Firefox? - initial deployment of Firefox - deploying a baseline Firefox config for new users - maintaining configuration or avoiding configuration drift (i.e. default or enforced policies/settings) - controlled updates of the browser and all its other components (including having a relatively recent malware/phishing database, CRLs, etc. on the local drive) - anything specific to a 'lab' environment (since it can have special circumstances that are different than normal enterprise user management) Are Firefox version upgrades (major, minor, and security updates) typically handled via just deploying the latest EXE over any previous versions? Is there anyone here who doesn't let Firefox upgrade itself but rather use your software deployment or patching system like Altiris/SCCM/LANDESK/Zendesk handle it? What's the general technique? Is there anything to watch out for? Any comments on the virtualization of Firefox such as with App-V? Sorry for the long post. I appreciate any tips or advice even if it's to answer just one of my questions. Thanks! ;) -- Scott Copus, Lab Systems Engineer Academic Technology | Western Kentucky University (270)745-3042 | http://www.wku.edu/it/labs _______________________________________________ Enterprise mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/enterprise To unsubscribe from this list, please visit https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/enterprise or send an email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe"
