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.

Hi folks,
finally, i found the time to publish an piece of extra software, which we successfully used for years.
The basic is the GPO for Firefox Extension from here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/gpo-for-firefox/
See also:

However, since we use GPO’s for different Mozilla-products, we changed the keys, where the Policies are written in the registry.
Computer context:
HKLM/Software/Policies/Firefox
HKLM/Software/Policies/Firefox/locked

User context:
HKCU/Software/Policies/Firefox
HKCU/Software/Policies/Firefox/locked

Therefore, the paths in the ADMX-template point to this locations.

There are still a lot of preferences missing from the template. But it’s a start and adding new ones is not that hard.

gpo_for_firefox-0.9.2-fx-ETH.xpi
Firefox.admx

Here is Version 1.1 of the ADMX-Template to control important settings in Adobes Acrobat and Reader. Now with support for Acrobat/Reader X.
New feature is the the control of the protected mode, which was introduced in Reader X.

Here is an newly created ADMX-Template for disabling the most dangerous security issues in Adobes Acrobat and Reader. With it, you can disable JavaScript globally for version 7-9 of the mentioned products. There is also an option to block JavaScript functions with an entry into the blacklist. It has been done in ADMX to make use of the new Central Store functionality introduced in Server 2k8 AD.

Hello, dear reader.
Welcome to my blog. On this site, i will post different aspects of Windows deployment.