Locking down Firefox on Ubuntu
Sunday, January 28th, 2007Edit /usr/lib/firefox/firefox.cfg to read:
//
lockPref("app.update.enabled", false);
lockPref("network.proxy.http", "192.168.1.3");
lockPref("network.proxy.http_port", 3128);
lockPref("network.proxy.type", 1);
lockPref("network.proxy.no_proxies_on", "localhost, 127.0.0.1, 192.168.0.0/16, 172.0.0.0/8");
lockPref("network.proxy.share_proxy_settings", true);
lockPref("browser.startup.homepage", "http://www.google.com/ncr");
Find any additional settings to lock down by entering “about:config” in the Firefox address bar. The resulting list is all of the settings that can be locked.
UPDATE: Ubuntu has an annoying habit of overwriting this file every time it updates Firefox. My short-term work-around is to copy the contents of firefox.cfg to firefox.cfg.local and then setting a root cron job (using “sudo crontab -e”) with the following entry (copies the .local file back over the .cfg file every hour - so the longest you’re without locked prefs is that hour. Make it shorter if you prefer.):
# Restore firefox.cfg to preferred configuration every hour.
# Corrects bug where firefox.cfg gets overwritten by update.
0 * * * * cp /usr/lib/firefox/firefox.cfg.local /usr/lib/firefox/firefox.cfg
