single firefox profile across all users and profiles on networks
I'm in the process of setting up Firefox as the standard browser for an entire building, and part of this is ensuring that everyone's firefox profiles are saved to personal network drives as opposed to the local machines. I can use the profile manager to do this on a user-to-user basis, but what if I want all the users of any machine to use the same firefox profile that points to a specific network drive? (This will ensure users always have their browser settings and such regardless of where they access them, allow us to switch machines out without losing anyone's browser settings, etc. The contents of this drive are specific to the user account, but always have the same path.)
As far as I can tell, profiles created in the profile manager are specific to each (domain) user, which would mean an awful lot of manual profile creation. Is there some way to ensure Firefox always uses a specific Firefox profile or path? Is there some way to have firefox check which profiles exist (in a .bat file, for example), so I can create the proper one if needed? Can I use a command line to set which profile to use by default, or can that only be done from the profile manager GUI?
Finally, and this one may warrant a separate query, but I've found that when using profiles that point to a network drive, trying to open firefox on multiple computers will fail (another instance of firefox is open, close it or restart). Can I tell Firefox to force the old instance closed, or will I have to firefox.exe -no-remote -p "differentProfile" every time?
We're on Windows 7, by the way, for references' sake.
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Sort of. I still don't have a perfect method of checking for the presence of a profile, but as a workaround, I'm looking in my custom profile's server drive location for prefs.js (IF EXIST "path\path\Firefox\prefs.js" (do thing)), and that will at least tell me if I've created something there or not.
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Hello pucedragonlord, One thing you could do is run Firefox Through Microsoft Hyper-V Virtualisation system, but that's inconvenient. The only way is to do it on a User-To-User Basis, is to install Firefox for every users drive (I believe). Or just deploy Firefox, and require staff to login to firefox on their computer only.
On a seperate query, I need more information for the second question. Is it different user accounts when you try to use Firefox on seperate computers, and is the software hosted through a virtualisation system (Such as hyper-V) through the network?
Have a good one, Michael
We just deploy images, so everyone should have firefox already, but we're pretty good about keeping all data on mapped network drives instead of letting windows save things locally, so I'm trying to find the best way to integrate Firefox in that system as well.
Every user has a network domain account, which can be accessed from anywhere in the building. While mostly people use their own computers, due to the nature of the place, that is often not the case, and several people will need to sign on to the same machine on a given day.
If there are command-line ways of checking for firefox profiles, I can have them run in our logon script to ensure everyone always has access to their personal profiles, but I'm not sure the best way to go about that, yet. I suppose that's the main part of my second question--what is the cleanest way to check for and create/map/assign firefox profiles automatically?
Hello Again Puce, Thanks for changing your username (it's easier to type as just puce ;))
You may have to run the logon script to Map/Assign Firefox profiles, However, the creation of the profiles will be the most hellish thing you could imagine (Depending how many people are in your company). So, If you need help creating the accounts, just ask! But really, they're not necessary. It's really a personal preference. Just leave that up to the employees, or assign them a computer each. A better Idea is to run Firefox locally, and keep employee bookmarks on an intranet, where employees could login, and access their bookmarks that way, along with company events and information.
Hope this helped, Michael
I actually have a pretty good idea of how I'm going to create the profiles: since everyone's personal drives have the same filepath, I really only need my script to create one Firefox profile that points to that path. I also know I can use firefox.exe -CreateProfile "Custom path\path\path" to make it, but what I'm most unsure about is how I can check whether that profile exists or not, so as not to either overwrite it or cause the logon script to crash. Firefox itself will still be running locally, I just need to ensure the profile path is on the network.
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Hello,
I am glad to hear that your problem has been resolved. If you haven't already, please select the answer that solves the problem. This will help other users with similar problems find the solution more easily.
Thank you for contacting Mozilla Support.
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Sort of. I still don't have a perfect method of checking for the presence of a profile, but as a workaround, I'm looking in my custom profile's server drive location for prefs.js (IF EXIST "path\path\Firefox\prefs.js" (do thing)), and that will at least tell me if I've created something there or not.