Nick Heim

When i first heard the intention of Mozilla, to abandon the XUL-extension-interface, i was shocked.
How the hell should i deliver a satisfying user experience to our customers, without multi-language interface, Noscript, Adblock and custom configuration?
In the meantime, FF57 has landed, the dust is blown away and our first in-house release of Firefox 57 (57.0.2) is on the deployment system.
What features and extensions did survive the extreme renovation?
First of all: Noscript and Adblock Plus
Further more: Multi-lingual feature with all our Languages spoken here in Switzerland, which automatically follows the OS-Language.
And least but not last: An even better implementation of the GPO-Extension for Firefox!

To achieve all this, quite some work was needed.
The multi-lingual interface, which in theory was already there through the function of the pref “intl.locale.matchOS”, was never usable on Windows.
This is now fixed from V57 onward. See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1413866
Zibi, thank you for your fast, straight forward approach and work!

The GPO functionality has been moved to Autoconfig/CCK2.
Thank goes to Pavel Kardash @ https://mozillagpo.sourceforge.io/ for putting together a perfect working Javascript-Module for this.
Just create your autoconfig with the famous CCK2 from Mike Kaply (https://mike.kaply.com/cck2/) and append the 2 lines to cck2.cfg to call the gpo.jsm and you are done!

Adblock Plus seems to work on FF57 out of the box like always.
Noscript is a bit trickier. We had to wait for several week, until with 10.1.5.7, it was quite stable and usable again.
Another story here is to deploy a custom default white-list. We could not find a way to populate this in Autoconfig with Javascript. Maybe later…
In the meantime, we use the default profile functionality from CCK2 to copy a preconfigured “storage-sync.sqlite” file to new profiles.

And with the help of NANT, WIX, 7zip and Powershell, a fully automated build process, gives us a stable MSI-package and several Transforms, in less than 10 min.