On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 9:17 PM, Liu, David <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Question for those who are deploying FF in the enterprise:
Haven't deployed it across the company, just to a few people who requested it, but: > 1. how are you managing FF upgrades, via GPO? Yup, MSI install/upgrade. The timeliness of FrontMotion's releases is a concern, but more recently, they haven't been lagging far behind. I keep hoping for an "official" MSI build from Mozilla. I haven't had the time to look into contributing something myself. My schedule is improving; maybe I'll be able to do more in the future. > 2. from security perspective, IEs can be patched internally via WSUS > quite readily with the push of a few buttons. Patching FF on the other > hand is not so easy ... Dropping in a new MSI in the GPO is pretty easy, and even the full install package is only like 8 megabytes. I think I've seen IE patches that big. :) > 3. In terms of ability to centrally administer/config browser FF, its > also quite lacking. Haven't had a need (see above about few users), but: There's nothing GUI, but from what I've read, you exact quite a bit of control if you're willing to dive into the config files. There are directives to set new default values for a preference setting, and also to force a values (so the user cannot change them). By putting them in a config file the user cannot write to, you can prevent users from working around them. And it's possible to "include" config files from a network location. As I recall, the config files were basically JavaScript files, so it should even be possible to come up with selective configurations. Of course, all that is obviously nowhere near as slick and polished as the GPO support in Internet Explorer, but it's not a total dead-end, either. And it has some advantages; you can control everything at the individual preference entry level, not just the stuff there are GPOs for. It'd be nice to have full GPO support with ADM templates, to be sure. I'm guessing that's unlikely to ever make it into the mainline source tree, since it would be a lot of platform-specific code that would have to touch all sorts of features. Although maybe it could be done just by having some kind of auxiliary utility use GPO settings to populate a Firefox config file. Hmmm. > I'm surprised that there is no config settings for setting FF bookmarks & > allowing > admins to dynamically update them & push them out to users. Hmmmm. You might be able to use the "Live Bookmarks" feature to turn an RSS feed into network-based bookmark publishing. Dunno. -- Ben ~ Upgrade to Next Generation Antispam/Antivirus with Ninja! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbelt-software.com/SunbeltMessagingNinja.cfm> ~
