Mozilla Firefox is a very populair internet browser and even when Internet Explorer is installed by default, most people still prefer Mozilla Firefox for browsing the web. Therefore it’s very interesting to also have Mozilla Firefox at work.
Before we publish this application we are going to focus on what Mozilla Firefox does exactly in the userprofile and registry.
Like any other application Mozilla Firefox creates some user specified registry settings and profile directory’s. After starting Mozilla Firefox for the first time the %AppData%\Roaming\Mozilla directory is created which has the most important data in it for Mozilla Firefox.
The default size of this directory is around 13MB which is quite large and could cause some troubles in large environments when Roaming Profiles are used.
Imagine that aside from the profile size of the user which could be very large, the 13MB of the Mozilla Firefox profile will also be roamed when logging on and off which could cause a delay for all the users during logon.
A good workaround for this issue could be the user of a Mandatory Profile, but with the use of a Mandatory Profile the profile will start from zero after a new login. So all the personal settings of your users will be forgot after a new logon and could cause your users to get upset.
In this article i will describe how to publish Mozilla Firefox with RES Workspace Manager and have the personal settings saved using User Settings Templates.
RES Workspace Manager provides a set of pre-defined templates for the most populair applications. This list gets updated very often and therefore At the moment RES Workspace Manager has User Settings Templates for the most used applications and the list gets updated very often.
It’s also possible to create User Settings Templates yourself but i will describe this in another post.
So if we choose the User Settings Template for Mozilla Firefox and zoom in on it we can see that the %AppData%\Mozilla\Firefox\profiles.ini and the %AppData%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles are pre-defined. This is enough to remember the user specified settings for Mozilla Firefox.
As you can see you are free to add registry locations or folders to this template to expand the scope of this template. You can do this by clicking on Add, for this article it isn’t needed to add extra settings to this template.
If we add the User Setting Template to Mozilla Firefox we will be sure that all the user specific settings will be remembered for the users who have access to Mozilla Firefox.
In the beginning of this article we saw that the default Mozilla Firefox profile is quite large, around 13MB. After enabling this User Setting Template the size of the Mozilla Firefox profile is reduced to around 80KB! which is a very large reduction in size making the Mozilla Firefox profile usable in any environment!
In the next article we will describe how to create a custom User Settings Template for an application.
This is all very well. But when a user has been using Firefox for a while – the \Profiles folder tree can contain a whole lot more than 80 KB. I did a few checks – result 29 MB and 112 MB. This means that you have to be a little bit more selective than just grabbing the entire \Profiles folder tree.
If using mandatory profiles you also have to consider using user profile maintenance to set up the basic Mozilla Firefox settings in the profile.
Hi Kristian, you are correct and you are able to create exclusions and add them to the template but the problem with Firefox is that it always creates a random profilename so you can’t pre-target it to create the exclude.
There is a way to exclude the cache folder though. It’s described here: http://www.infohole.com/blog/computing/firefox-cache-location/