Safari managed homepage

[DanR1974]

Good Morning all,
Running into a small "gotcha" and wondering if anyone can help shed some light on it. We're running Casper 8.64 along with 10.6.8 clients. Also running Safari 5.1.5 due to the flash disabling in newer versions.
Problem we're seeing is that although the managed preference for the Safari homepage is working(via JSS), we're finding that when the user opens Safari the first time, it goes to Apple.com (actually looks like /welcome flashes for a quick second first). Does anyone know of a way I can disable or stop that?
I have tried changing the UserTemplate, I tried a login script, tried the jamf setHomePage -feu -fet -homepage and the first time the user logs in, they still get the Apple.com page.

So if anyone can please point me in the right direction, I would be very grateful.

Thank you
Dan Rodgers
Racine Unified Schools

[bentoms]

We use MCX to set ours & it works fine.

Is MCX an option?

[DanR1974]

No unfortunately MCX is no longer part of our current setup.

[rtrouton]

You may be able to set this with a script. I have a post on the correct defaults commands to run:

http://derflounder.wordpress.com/2013/08/16/setting-new-window-and-new-tab-behavior-in-safari/

[GabeShack]

Any info on making these settings work on all users instead of just the logged in user? I see that ```
defaults write com.apple.Safari NewWindowBehavior -int 0
``` seems to work fine on the current user, but I figured there is a way to write this to the user template somehow so it populates all the users.

Gabe Shackney
Princeton Public Schools

[gregneagle]

Using MCX or Configuration Profiles would be the recommended/supported approach to manage a Safari preference for all users of a machine.

[GabeShack]

I won't be moving back to mcx at this point, but I found a script that will populate this properly.

Gabe Shackney
Princeton Public Schools

[imperatives]

We have had good luck using Configuration Profiles with a custom payload to configure Safari: com.apple.Safari.plist
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict> <key>ConfirmClosingMultiplePages</key> <false/> <key>NewWindowBehavior</key> <integer>0</integer> <key>NewTabBehavior</key> <integer>1</integer> <key>DownloadsClearingPolicy</key> <integer>1</integer> <key>DownloadsPath</key> <string>~/Desktop</string> <key>HomePage</key> <string>http://www.homepage.com</string> <key>LastDisplayedWelcomePageVersionString</key> <string>4.0</string>
</dict>
</plist>