Mozilla offers sysadmins a Policy Engine for roll-your-own Firefox installs Mozilla’s announced it will add a “policy engine” to the next extended support (ESR) release of its Firefox browser. ESRs are supported for at least a year and give users the chance to settle on a browser for a while, rather than having to keep up with the faster release cadence offered to consumers. The next ESR release will …
Not sure what they mean here as you can already do the things listed with config files and although it's been a while since I was doing it, I seem to recall at least one of those files were JSON. Happy to be corrected on that though.
I know, Mozilla - how about actually providing a mechanism to manage FF from AD Group Policies?
I'd suggest anyone thinking of deploying FF in any kind of commercial/production environment get a hold of CCK2 to do it.
It sounds like it means that if I hover over a tab without ever opening it, Firefox will do (some of?) what is needed to paint it. But at least some of what is needed to paint it includes making network requests and running random bits of JS and so on. That stuff can't be unwound in general. I don't think I want a browser which does that when I have not even opened a tab. Perhaps it will be clever enough to do only those things it is sure it can do without talking to the network or running JS?
> Perhaps it will be clever enough
Good one!...
Seriously, it will probably just load and execute everything and then flush and start again, which means that if for some reason your mouse cursor moves accidentally over a dozen tabs your computer will stuff all pages into the download pipeline, wait for them, execute dozens of JavaScripts, cancel them and purge memory. Depending on your computer you'll experience a timeout of one to several seconds.
And all that to load a page a couple milliseconds faster... Now that's literally a killer feature!
(That all been said, knowing Mozilla there will most likely be some about:config setting to disable that nonsense.)
Hopefully this is them slowly working towards some form of group policy management so that it can actually be properly deployed and managed within an organisation, it's made me cry over the years that the only real alternative to IE if you want easy central management is google.
Quite a few of these "new controls" have been available through autoconfig for years. But they apparently forgot, since autoconfig isn't that easy to implement. Look at the comments on the site of Mike Kaply, the creator of CCK2. Since ESR52 one has to jump through various hoops to get everything to work on a new profile.
it could provide an easy way of keeping the thing configured across upgrades, so I'll possibly give it a try.
Incidentally, a month or two ago, as I was about to deinstall Firefox on account of unacceptable performance and as I therefore had nothing to lose, I went into the config and enabled multi-process.
Night and day. It works impressively well now and, having learned over the years how to lock it down properly, I decided against getting rid of it.
In other news, there is something called Firefox Klar on F-Droid that everyone who minimally cares about privacy should consider installing. It is basically a *very* Spartan Firefox that goes back to a pristine state as soon as you close it.
From my experience over the last 15 years, on the whole I don't have many nice things to say about Mozilla, but credit due where it's due.
> If this isnt working with AD Group Policy, whats the point?
1. Firefox is a cross-platform browser.
2. It is not a particularly onerous task to integrate policy files with / into your LDAP system, whatever schemata you use.
3. One gets the impression you are whingeing about something you do not have to pay for and likely were not going to use anyway.
4. https://github.com/n8felton/Firefox-ADMX
1. Firefox is a cross-platform browser.
> Yes indeed but most corporations run Windows clients connected to an AD and it would be nice to have native controls from the actual software vendor
2. It is not a particularly onerous task to integrate policy files with / into your LDAP system, whatever schemata you use.
> It really is. First you have to know which files to target, as FF uses quite the mix to configure your settings. Then you have the massive issue of how do you actually target the correct FF user profile, since when you create a new one, it creates a randomised folder name to drop them it.
3. One gets the impression you are whingeing about something you do not have to pay for and likely were not going to use anyway.
> Well it wasn't me whinging but it's nice to have choice. Not everyone wants to use IE, Edge or Chrome but these are the browsers you are limited to right now if you want to manage via GPO. And trust me - I had to deliver FF into a high secure gov environment last year. It's a PITA
4. https://github.com/n8felton/Firefox-ADMX
> Yep not bad but in some environments such as the one above you have to be able to have full transparency of all software and add-ons. That's being able to trace right back to whom and where they originate from etc and that's not always easy.
Plus you run the risk of a new version of FF breaking third party tools (same as anything).
It was only recently that FF included the ability to utilise the Windows certificate store on a client machine. Before that, you had to package every certificate you wanted into FF (again, CCK2 becomes a godsend here) but then if you change one of them, you had to repackage it and then blow away users' FF profiles...so all their personalisations would be lost.
Ultimately, FF is simply not enterprise ready. Nor would I ever expect it to be.
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