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Is it possible to share Firefox profiles among multiple users from a central location?

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  • Last reply by guigs

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On my team, we have a suite of automated test procedures using Firefox and Selenium. The automated tests depend on a collection of Firefox profiles to be set up beforehand, each profile with a certificate loaded for a different user. In order to make the setup of the tests more streamlined, we thought it would be a good idea to collect all the profiles and put them out in a shared location in a network mount. We then have users modify their profiles.ini file to point to the profiles in the shared location.

This seems to work at first, but then we noticed that when a user loads a profile, Firefox appears to change file ownership and access permissions for several files within the profile. Whereas the file used to have 777 permissions, it now has 755 permissions, and is owned by the user who opened the profile. This "breaks" the profile in the shared location. If a different user then tries to load that profile, they get permission denied errors.

I realize this is probably not the way Firefox profiles were designed to be used, but is it possible to make it work with our needs?

On my team, we have a suite of automated test procedures using Firefox and Selenium. The automated tests depend on a collection of Firefox profiles to be set up beforehand, each profile with a certificate loaded for a different user. In order to make the setup of the tests more streamlined, we thought it would be a good idea to collect all the profiles and put them out in a shared location in a network mount. We then have users modify their profiles.ini file to point to the profiles in the shared location. This seems to work at first, but then we noticed that when a user loads a profile, Firefox appears to change file ownership and access permissions for several files within the profile. Whereas the file used to have 777 permissions, it now has 755 permissions, and is owned by the user who opened the profile. This "breaks" the profile in the shared location. If a different user then tries to load that profile, they get permission denied errors. I realize this is probably not the way Firefox profiles were designed to be used, but is it possible to make it work with our needs?

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This is a question for the enterprise mailing list. Please see their mail address on the Firefox for Enterprise FAQ page. Enterprise FAQ