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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schrotthaufen

@trysdyn One could even pre-install their favorite extensions like e.g. uBO. AND with the policy templates for Windows, one can paste the json as is to have the same settings in Windows as in other OSes.