Mastodawn

Electric Gremlin Mar 1, 2025

Reminder that Firefox has a pathway to specifying some settings, including ones not exposed to users any other way, with a config file stored on disk.

They call it enterprise policies but anyone can use it by just putting a file in the location indicated on that site.

You can disable entire features, opt out of Telemetry before your first launch of Firefox on a new install, declare you never want to be part of studies, turn off their ML integration and keep it off, force about:config preferences in a way that can't be "accidentally" reverted, etc.

policy-templates

Policy Templates for Firefox

policy-templates

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Electric Gremlin Mar 1, 2025

This is mine at the moment. I throw out a lot of stuff; be familiar with what everything does by cross-referencing it with the site in the last post, or a preferences list, before just using this because it turns off auto-updating, half of Firefox's features, and changes the UI in ways.

You can't comment JSON 🙃

{
  "policies": {
    "AppAutoUpdate": false,
    "AutofillCreditCardEnabled": false,
    "BackgroundAppUpdate": false,
    "CaptivePortal": false,
    "DisableAccounts": true,
    "DisableFeedbackCommands": true,
    "DisableFirefoxAccounts": true,
    "DisableFirefoxScreenshots": true,
    "DisableFirefoxStudies": true,
    "DisablePocket": true,
    "DisableTelemetry": true,
    "DontCheckDefaultBrowser": true,
    "FirefoxHome": {
      "SponsoredTopSites": false,
      "Highlights": false,
      "Pocket": false,
      "SponsoredPocket": false,
      "Snippets": false
    },
    "FirefoxSuggest": {
      "WebSuggestions": false,
      "SponsoredSuggestions": false,
      "ImproveSuggest": false
    },
    "ManualAppUpdateOnly": true,
    "OfferToSaveLogins": false,
    "PasswordManagerEnabled": false,
    "PictureInPicture": {
      "Enabled": false
    },
    "Preferences": {
      "browser.ml.chat.enabled": false,
      "browser.uidensity": 1,
      "dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled": false,
      "browser.translations.enable": false,
      "app.normandy.enabled": false
    },
    "SearchSuggestEnabled": false,
    "UserMessaging": {
      "WhatsNew": false,
      "ExtensionRecommendations": false,
      "FeatureRecommendations": false,
      "UrlbarInterventions": false,
      "SkipOnboarding": true,
      "MoreFromMozilla": false
    }
  }
}

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Oliver Jensen Mar 1, 2025

@trysdyn you can indeed comment json if the schema isn't restricted and you are willing to be silly enough 😁

```
{
"thing": "foo",
"//": "you can comment json",
"// ": "provided that you have no shame",
}
```

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Dawn Ahukanna

@ojensen @trysdyn
Yep
‘“[objectname]Comment”:”This is a comment”,
…’

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Oliver Jensen Mar 2, 2025

@dahukanna @trysdyn : ☝️ wise.

For anyone who doesn't see the value of this format: this keeps the comment adjacent to the thing you're commenting, even if the structure goes through a decode/encode cycle (provided the keys get alphabetized, which is pretty common). Few things are more frustrating than picking up a line comment and moving it arbitrarily away from the thing it refers to.