Group Policy Templates / Preferences (Deprecated)
I am looking for information regarding the support life for settings that are defined in the Preferences (Deprecated) section of the ADMX templates provided in GitHub. There doesn't appear to be a definitive answer as to when these preferences are no longer applicable to a version of Firefox. The term "Deprecated" certainly applies they're on their way to extinction. But only a small handful of preferences have been ported over to non-deprecated template settings (like Auto Update). Is there an expected version of Firefox where all these preferences are meaningless? Or will they be supported indefinitely? "Industry recommendations' from 3rd party security vendors are bloating my policies in the domain space and I can't definitively say they are 'no longer supported as of version xyz' for all these Firefox Preference settings, which happen to be about 80% of the security parameters defined by STIG and/or CIS Workbench.
Chosen solution
As far as I know, it is deprecated for real. You have to switch to the new Preferences policy, which contains geo.enabled.
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I don't understand. Previously you could only set and lock a subset of preferences. Starting with Firefox 81 and Firefox ESR 78.3 you have new Preferences policy which contains many more than the deprecated one.
Thanks Ty,
My question is regarding the entirety of the 30+ settings available in the "preferences" container/folder that you're speaking to within the ADMX templetates. The container/folder itself literally is called "deprecated" in the name, which would leave me to assume they are, in fact, are on their way out of support. What I'm after is if this is a true or false statement and the phrasing of the policy container is misleading and the 30+ settings within are legit and supported for many years to come?
You'll note, "Deprecated" is the policy folder name; its even in the URL string.
https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/master/README.md#preferences-deprecated
Getting more specific, this would be one example of the many contained within: geo.enabled
Deprecated for real.... or supported all the way through Firefox ESR 102? Is there an expected End of Support for this very specific example? I'm after that kind of info. Or asking the question another way: Why are there 30+ configurable settings for Firefox in a policy folder called "Deprecated" if the reality is... they're not?
Hope that helps clarify what i'm after.
Chosen Solution
As far as I know, it is deprecated for real. You have to switch to the new Preferences policy, which contains geo.enabled.
You just steered me down the corrective path; didn't even know that new "Preferences" policy existed (leveraging the JSON format). Thank you very much for this.
So just to make sure this is extra clear.
Previously I had an explicit list of preferences you could set (that's the deprecated policy) and so those prefs had to be explicitly set in their own policy.
In order to broaden this feature, I implemented setting arbitrary preferences in JSON (as well as setting different types of prefs - user/default/locked)
As far as the deprecation goes, I have no plans to remove the old way, but you have to pick one or the other - they can't coexist.