Lock Firefox 6 Prefs (Also versions 3, 4, & 5)

Shawn Powers — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 20:00:00 +0000

In a corporate environment, it's often important to enforce Internet proxy settings for all users. Setting those options automatically is often difficult. Making them locked and immutable is even more difficult and poorly documented. Today we'll learn the basics, and from there you can customize Firefox as much or as little as you like.

The first thing to understand is how Firefox preferences work. In your browser, type the address "about:config" and press enter. After agreeing to their warning message, you should see a whole list of configuration options listed with their current settings. These settings are for your user only, but it should help you get the notion for just how many settings are possible to set.

If you're comfortable with the command line, the steps we're going to go over are quicker and easier with a terminal window, but we're going to show the GUI way so as not to exclude anyone. (If you are comfortable on the command line, you'll know how to follow the directions below without any problems)

I'm using Ubuntu 11.04 for this demonstration, but most distributions have similar setups. You might have to search a little for where preference files are stored, but the procedure will be similar. First we need to open a Nautilus window with superuser privileges. To do that, press ALT-F2, then type: gksudo nautilus and press enter.

Next we need to navigate the file system to the /etc/firefox directory. Depending on your version of Firefox, and your distribution, this folder and its contents might vary a bit. This is what it looks like with Ubuntu 11.04 and Firefox 6:

The file we want to edit is that syspref.js file. This file might not be here for different versions, in which case you can try editing whatever .js file you find. Also files inside the pref folder are usually parsed, so you could create a .js file in there and it will probably work. Unfortunately, you'll just need to try it and see if it works.

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Lock Firefox 6 Prefs (Also versions 3, 4, & 5)