Firefox Profile

[mpermann]

I'm considering deploying a pre-configured Firefox profile for new staff computers and I'm wondering if anyone has tried this and whether there were any problems doing it. On a fresh system, I installed the latest version of Firefox and used Composer to capture the Firefox and Mozilla folders located at ~/Library/Application Support as well as a couple plist files (com.apple.ATS.plist and org.mozilla.firefox.plist) from ~/Library/Preferences after I made some very basic setting changes in Firefox's preferences. I inspected all the various files located in those folders and only one (secmod.db) seems to have a path referencing files located in the current users folder. A little Googling reveals the secmod.db and cert8.db files are files that apparently can be deleted and new ones will get created at launch time. So I removed those files from the list of captured files. My limited testing reveals things seem to work as anticipated. I know when you launch Firefox for the first time the profile folder name gets created with random characters and I don't know if having multiple people with the same profile folder name is going to create any problems down the line. If there is a better/more appropriate method to create a fresh customized Firefox profile I'm certainly open to trying something different. Any suggestions or comments are appreciated. Thanks.

[ctangora · Accepted solution]

Two suggestions.

First one... use CCKWizard. It gives you so much more than what you are doing now. Almost total customization of Firefox, certs, preferences, etc. All stored in the application itself so even if you nuke a user's profile, the settings are still there.

Two... having the same profile name will not be a problem, since it is referenced in the user's home directory. Before I used CCK Wizard we had the same profile name for all Firefox profiles. No problems with it.

But the first suggestion really is the way to go.

[mpermann]

Thanks for your reply ctangora. I took a quick look at CCK Wizard and will likely go that route in the future. I need to find the time to figure out how to make all the necessary customizations using that software. Since I can't find a manual for the software, it's going to take a little more time than I have available now to figure out. For now, I think I'll go with just using the captured profile.