Firefox homepage for all users

English Applications
1

Hi,
I would like to set the same homepage in Firefox for all users. I have searched the web however none of the hints succeeded.
Anybody who can help me here? Thanks.

Jan

2

I do not think you can force your users into having the same starting page in Firefox. It is a personal setting in a user’s home directory. I am not aware of a system configuration file for Firefox.

3

https://terokarvinen.com/2016/firefox-system-wide-settings-etcfirefoxsyspref-js/

4

Looks like something. I checked on my system for anything firefox in the system area, but /etc/firefox is apparently not created by the installation of Firefox.

5

There’s this ArchWiki hint – <Firefox - ArchWiki; – with a caveat → openSUSE uses ‘/usr/lib64/’ for the Firefox directory …

  • You need to create a ‘/usr/lib64/firefox/defaults/pref/local-settings.js
    ’ file. - Use ‘/usr/lib64/firefox/defaults/pref/all-openSUSE.js
    ’ as a template.

To find what you need to place in the local settings file, search as follows:


 > find .mozilla/ -name 'prefs.js' -exec /usr/bin/grep -i 'home' '{}' \;
user_pref("browser.startup.homepage", "about:blank");
user_pref("browser.startup.homepage_override.buildID", "20220718130424");
user_pref("browser.startup.homepage_override.mstone", "91.12.0");
user_pref("doh-rollout.home-region", "DE");
 >

To note the exact path for your ‘prefs.js’ file, use –

 > find .mozilla/ -name 'prefs.js' -print

If you really want to annoy your users, you can also lock the preference – meaning that, a Firefox user will not be able to change the setting – <https://kb.mozillazine.org/Locking_preferences&gt;.

6

If they are not on at the same time and are all members of the same group - you can put a good .mozilla file for all say in /usr/share and remove .mozilla from every user and put a symbolic link in their home directory to /usr/share/.mozllia

Choose a good user with proper addins and home page with firefox closed

sudo mv /home/goodusername/.mozilla /usr/share/

then for all the users in home (you might have to grep exclude those that do not need this)

sudo for x in `ls /home`
do
mv /home/$x/.mozilla /home/$x/.mozilla.sav
ln -s /usr/share/.mozilla /home/$x/.mozilla
done

You can undo that by removing the symbolic link and renaming the .sav to the original name .mozilla

My 2 cents - I had to do something like this for a different app to force each user to use the same calling sequence as some kept forgetting to enter the correct info and I could not use an alias to fix the issue.

7

There are many ways to accomplish that.

Have a look in the Mozilla documentation and choose what suits you best.

Regards

susejunky