It’s that time of year.. where I need to refresh and create new SOEs. One thing I’ve decided I want better this year is the firefox user experience. I’m tired of windows popping up making sure the users know their rights, and welcoming them to firefox. So here is a quick run down on the modifications I packaged to provide a better firefox user experience.
We’re on 10.6.8 and Firefox 6.0.2
First of all I want to set the default homepage.
Navigate to: /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS
Create a file called “browserconfig.properties” and add the following lines
browser.startup.homepage_reset=http://lisacherie.com
browser.startup.homepage=http://lisacherie.com
Next I’d like to remove the annoying popup on first launch asking if you would like to migrate a safari or other profile. Create a file in the same directory called “override.ini” with the following:
[XRE]
EnableProfileMigrator=false
Now to turn off some features like autoupdate which if allowed to run free might override my carefully selected customisations or worse just not work. I am also configuring firefox to use the system defined proxy. Some of the users where I work like to switch to anonymous proxies via the web browser (It’s nice to know our internet filtering works well!), so this will be locked to prevent change.
lockPref("app.update.enabled", false);
lockPref("browser.rights.3.shown", true);
lockPref("browser.startup.homepage_override.mstone", "ignore");
lockPref("browser.startup.homepage", "http://lisacherie.com");
lockPref("browser.shell.checkDefaultBrowser", false);
lockPref("network.proxy.type", 5);
lockPref("profile.allow_automigration", false);
lockPref("profile.confirm_automigration", false);
lockPref("startup.homepage_override_url", "");
lockPref("startup.homepage_welcome_url", "");
Now to let firefox know to use these settings we have carefully crafted create the file:
/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/defaults/pref/_config.js
and populate with:
pref("general.config.obscure_value", 0);
pref("general.config.filename", "firefox.cfg");
Good luck! remember to make sure you use the same permissions as the existing firefox config files (watch out for the ACL). Please share if you find some other useful customisations.