On Thu, Aug 7, 2014 at 11:36 AM, Heaton, Joseph@Wildlife <[email protected]> wrote: > Our organization is moving towards using a proxy for internet browsing. > Trouble is, we allow multiple browsers (IE, Chrome and Firefox). Chrome is > easy since it uses the settings from IE, and IE has GPO settings I can use. > But Firefox doesn’t.
There are a few ways you can tackle this. I believe Firefox's default on Windows is "Use system proxy settings", which makes it sound like it should just follow whatever MSIE is set to. I've had inconsistent results with it, but I haven't really looked into it, either. (This feature showed up long after I had implemented other solutions.) Maybe this is the Right Way and one just needs to look. WPAD (Web Proxy Auto Discovery), as Kurt Buff mentions, works well if your goal is to help those who want to be helped. It doesn't enforce anything, though -- no mandatory proxy. It's also not the default, so it's not a complete solution. So a lot of admins arrive at the conclusion that one must force the setting in Firefox. There are, generally, two ways to do this. The official Mozilla way is to use a lockPref directive in a general config file. Firefox uses files for all its configuration. This is decidedly not GPO-ish, but on the other hand, it works the same way on all platforms. Mozilla targets more than just MS Windows, so that's important to them. Setting it up is a little weird. You need to create a "local-settings.js" file in the "defaults/pref" directory of the installed Firefox. This file will generally have a single directive, telling Firefox where to look for another config file. That second file -- conventionally named "mozilla.cfg" -- is where you do all your preference locking. More info here: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Locking_preferences You can use Group Policy Preferences to distribute those files, or create a custom installer, or use a startup script, or SCCM, or whatever you usually do to push files out to clients. The other way to do this is with FrontMotion Firefox Community Edition (FFCE). FFCE is Firefox modified to add GPO support. This makes Firefox admin'able with Group Policy, just like countless other programs. It's still free, even. Drawbacks are, since it the program has been modified, FrontMotion can't use the official Firefox trademarks (icon and logo). FrontMotion also tends to lag a week or two behind the official releases. More info here: http://www.frontmotion.com/FMFirefoxCE/ -- Ben
