Web Browser Home Page Reporting (not setting)?

[adkinsan]

We are looking to collect the home page of our users' Safari, Firefox, and Chrome browsers. We do not need to set the home pages, only to report the home page of each browser. This might a script, or a set of scripts (or scripts driving extension attributes).

The second part of this will be to report out the usage of each browser to determine the dominant browser on each system (assuming one user per system).

[EDIT] While our IT provides only the ESR version of Firefox, our users are allowed to grab whatever they wish, security withstanding.

[EDIT] A colleague has answered my question. Will post the script here soon.

[mm2270]

Not sure about Firefox and Chrome, but with Safari, the setting gets stored in each user's /Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.plist file.

$ defaults read ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.plist HomePage
$ https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/

You'd need to change the above to look at each user accounts directory or just get it for the current or last user in your script, instead of the ~ expansion.

[bentoms]

Chrome & Safari can both be set via MCX.

For Safari, you may also need to look at it's tab behaviour: http://macmule.com/2013/10/27/how-to-set-safari-7-to-open-at-the-homepage/

Firefox is a PITA & I'd advise against managing it, unless your using the ESR release.

[bentoms]

Sorry I misread the post.. (Catching up on the day!)

I'll post my chrome MCX later, or a defaults read command that returns the homepage.

[daz_wallace]

FireFox needs to really have some items in the .app bundle modified. I'd highly recommend using the CCK 2.x wizard Add-On for this.

Hope that helps!

Darren

[adkinsan · Accepted solution]

We wrote and used this Extension Attribute:
https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/viewProductFile.html?id=1&fid=737
which got us the information we were asked to collect.