Posts Tagged ‘enterprise’

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CCK Wizard Status

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

With the release of Firefox 3.6, people are already asking me about a new CCK Wizard. I am working on an update. You can get a beta of that here. Primary changes are more information on the proxy page, ability to open an existing CCK and better coexistence of multiple CCKs.

Most interesting news on the CCK front is that I’ve decided to move it to Google Code instead of maintaining in the Mozilla trees. The URL is http://code.google.com/p/ff-cckwizard/. My primary reason for doing this is honestly that I’m not really contributing to Mozilla/Firefox proper anymore and messing with Mercurial isn’t worth it for me (I know, lame excuse.) It has some other advantages, though, like having my own bug reporting system and not having to get any reviews/approvals for checkins.

So if you have ideas/suggestions/bugs for the CCK Wizard, please open them in Google Code.

Also note that CCK Wizard is something I do on the side, so my time is limited. Contributions help. I know there are a lot of folks who depend on this for the business. Any and all love is appreciated.

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Posted in firefox | 7 Comments »

I Couldn't Stay Away From the CCK

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

So it just so happens that some of the work I’m doing before I leave IBM involves the CCK, so I ended up working on it and fixing some bugs. In addition, a company asked for a feature that was pretty easy to implement. So here for your testing pleasure is:

CCK Wizard version 1.2.5

Here’s a summary of what’s changed:

  • Dropped support for Firefox 2
  • Added support for specifying sites where cookies are always allowed
  • Added support for specifying sites to deny popups/installs/cookies
  • Rewrote CCKService XPCOM Component to be a little cleaner
  • Fixed problem where sometimes a created CCK wouldn’t install (ZIP path problem)
  • Fixed problem where sometimes bookmarks weren’t created on first load
  • Fixed problem where bookmarks weren’t created in the same order as specified in the CCK Wizard
  • Made the additional help menu look better on Mac

Enjoy!

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Posted in firefox | 7 Comments »

CCK Wizard 1.2 Finally Available

Friday, January 16th, 2009

The CCK Wizard for Firefox 3 is finally available. I had been holding off trying to get some translation work but finally gave up. You can get it from amo:

CCK Wizard 1.2

Enjoy!

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Posted in firefox | 1 Comment »

Enterprise Firefox Requirements

Tuesday, August 12th, 2008

I was going through some old documents from the office and found the result of a brainstorming session around Enterprise Firefox requirements. I wanted to capture this list somewhere and figured this was the best place. Note that some of these might be done and some of these might not even be clear – this was just a moment in time. It will be interesting to see what other folks think of the list. It is in no particular order.

  • Security (keycards, etc.)
  • MSI Packaging
  • Active Directory Integration
  • Perfect unattended install
  • Allow entire Firefox directory to be specified
  • Roaming profiles
  • CCK for Thunderbird
  • Store preferences in registry?
  • Allow cache to be local with a remote profile
  • Better ActiveX sandbox for Firefox
  • Scalable deployment/management
    • IEAK
    • Active Directory
    • Registry Editing
  • Centralized Management
  • Better enterprise patch deployment tools (Tivoli)
  • WebDAV?
  • LDAP
  • Kiosk mode
  • Whitelisting

What do people think? What on this list is really important?

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Posted in firefox | 16 Comments »

Customizing Firefox with the CCK Wizard

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

New version with fix for search engines not working.

FYI, I’m making a beta of the CCK Wizard available today for Firefox 3.

If you are deploying Firefox in your enterprise, educational institution, or even your household, you’ll want to check out the CCK Wizard (info at that link is a little dated right now).The CCK Wizard is an implementation of the old Netscape CCK that allows you to customize various aspects of Firefox and then contain all of those customizations in a single Firefox extension. Here are some of the things you can do

  • Add an identifier to the user agent string
  • Change the default home page and startup override home page
  • Change the title bar text
  • Change the animated logo
  • Add a web page and tooltip used for the animated logo
  • Add a help menu item that links to a web page
  • Provide sites for which popups and XPInstalls are allowed by default
  • Preinstall browser plug-ins
  • Preinstall search engines
  • Change the default search engine
  • Add folders, bookmarks and live bookmarks to the personal toolbar
  • Add folders, bookmarks and live bookmarks to the bookmarks folder
  • Set default preferences
  • Lock preferences
  • Add registry keys (Windows only)
  • Add certificates (See NOTE below)
  • Set default proxy configurations
  • Package other XPIs with your distribution
  • Disable about:config

Note that if you customize Firefox using the CCK Wizard, there are certain restrictions on redistribution outside of your organization, especially if you add certificates. Read the Mozilla Foundation Trademark policies for more info, or contact licensing@mozilla.org.

And please let me know if you find any bugs.

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Posted in firefox | 8 Comments »

Group Policy Extension for Firefox

Friday, March 14th, 2008

I’ve been working with Cesar Oliveira from Seneca College to put together some initial attempts at group policy support. Here’s his comment from bug 267888:

Since there doesn’t seem to have been any communication from the assignee for
over a year, I am guessing that he is no longer working on it. With big help of
Michael Kaply (mkaply), we went into a different approach with this bug.

Instead of doing our own ADM template, we decided to do an implementation using
generic IE policies (gpedit.msc) that both browsers can share. For example,
setting the home page and enforcing full screen, and even disabling tabs! This
won’t be the best solution, because Firefox and IE are different in many ways.
But it gives us something to start with, as IE is already in the corporate
world, we might as well try imitating some of their success ;)

We haven’t implemented every policy (only slightly over a dozen). And it
definitely needs some polish to the functionality and the code. There are some
ways to get around certain policies (we don’t do any preference locking), but
it is certainly better than not moving forward.

The code was designed to go into the mozilla\extensions directory. It works
with the latest version of Firefox3 (Firefox3.0b5pre), but not Firefox 2
(started using fuel). You can check out the source code via svn:
svn://cdot.senecac.on.ca/ff-ad/trunk

I am also making available an extension you can use. I haven’t done much
testing with it, other than it installs and works with no tab browsing and
enforce full screen:
http://matrix.senecac.on.ca/~cdolivei/files/grouppolicy.xpi

I also made a list of policies that we implement. Please feel free to look and
give feedback.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pqlMBxIY5×3i2yeezToYGfg

So now I am requesting community feedback. What is going to stop this from one
day getting into the tree (I assume everyone on the CC list wants something
like this in)? Other than using IE’s policies, of course ;)

I think I got everything. If something is not working, feel free to email me.

This is really a first step, but I hope people will try it out.

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Posted in firefox | 6 Comments »

Customizing Reporter for your Enterprise

Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

Ever wish the reporter extension could be used to report problems with internal websites? Yuriy Krylov has an excellent post up about customizing reporter for your intranet. Definitely worth a read.

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Posted in firefox | 1 Comment »

Firefox, Group Policy and Active Directory

Thursday, January 24th, 2008

One of the complaints that seems to come up a lot with regards to Firefox in the enterprise is the lack of support for management via Active Directory (using Group Policies). There have actually been a couple attempts to solve this including FirefoxADM and WetDog. There is even a company, FrontMotion, that makes custom Firefox MSIs that can be managed via Active Directory.

I decided I don’t know enough about this area, so I’ve spent the past couple weeks investigating what Microsoft provides and the results actually surprised me: IE configuration via Group Policies seems to focus much more on customizing the browser(*) than it does on configuring individual preferences. Learning this made me wonder what exactly it is that people mean when the say that Firefox has a lack of support for Active Directory. Do they mean using Active Directory to manage install and updates? Or do they mean the types of customization that are provided via IE’s Group Policy.

So I’d like to pose a few questions to my readers:

  1. Do you use Active Directory and Group Policy to manage Internet Explorer? If so, what policies are most important to you?
  2. Do you use FirefoxADM or WetDog to manage Firefox? If so, what features are most important to you?
  3. If support for Group Policies was implemented for Firefox, should it focus more on customizing the browser or setting preferences?

For more information on this subject, here are some links:

(*) By customizing the browser I mean things like removing printing, removing the help menu, removing view source, removing the context menu, preventing saving files to disk, removing the ability to open new windows, turning off tabbed browing, removing access to bookmarks, etc.

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Posted in firefox | 9 Comments »

Simple Firefox Customizations: What Else Can I Do?

Monday, January 21st, 2008

Before we get started on this next topic, I need to make one correction. In earlier posts, I said to use collapsed="true" to hide XUL menuitems. A better option is to use hidden="true" instead. Using collapsed doesn’t hide the margins, so you get a lot of whitespace in your menus.

I also mentioned customizing the toolbar in my last post. We’ll actually save that for a future post.

Now that we’ve seen how to create XUL overlays to modify menus, let’s try out a real world scenario to see what else we might need to do. Let’s say we want to remove the user’s access to “Full Screen” mode. (I have no idea why you would ever want to do this, but Microsoft provides it as a customization in their group policy, so someone must want it.) Removing the menu is the easy part. We look in the file browser-menubar.inc and see that the ID of the menu is fullScreenItem. So by adding this code to our overlay: we make the menu go away.

But we have a problem. The user could also press F11 to use “Full Screen” mode. How do we stop that? Luckily key commands are also defined in XUL, so we can modify those. Most key commands are defined in the file browser-sets.inc. Searching through this file, we find: By simply adding this line to our overlay:we prevent the keystroke from working.

That was an easy one. Let’s try something harder. Let’s remove access to “View Source.” View Source can be accessed three different ways, the View menu, the keystroke Ctrl+U, and View Page Source on the page’s context menu. Let’s remove all three. We already learned how to remove the keystroke: What about the context menu? Removing items from the context menu can be done exactly the same way as removing items from any other menu – with hidden. The question is where do we get the IDs for items on the context menu. Similar to the main main and they keystrokes, it is stored it its own file, browser-context.inc. Here we see that the ID for the view source item on the context menu is context-viewsource so we can just add to our overlay. OK, one last thing. Let’s remove the actual View Source menuitem. Looking in browser-menubar.inc we see: Wait a minute. This menuitem has no ID? How can we hide it? Luckily we can put JavaScript into our XUL overlay as well. In cases where we don’t have an ID, we have to write custom JavaScript to do our work. Here’s some code that hides the View Source menuitem:

This code uses JavaScript to find the View Source menuitem and explicitly hide it. It does that by getting the length of the View menu popup (the number of items on it), and traversing backwards through the menuietems until it find the View Source menu. Then it explicitly sets the hidden attribute on the View Source menu. The reason we know this is the View Source menu is because we were able to look in the browser-menubar.inc to see other properties that are only set on that menu (command=”View:PageSource”).

So now you should have most of the tools in your toolbox to remove functionality from the Firefox menus using the CCK to create the XUL overlay.

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Posted in firefox | 3 Comments »

Simple Firefox Customizations: What Can I Change?

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

Now that we know where to add our XUL changes in a CCK XPI, let’s take a look at what we can change. You’ll remember from the previous post, we added this line:

and we were able to disable the Options… menuitem. The obvious questions then are, what else can I do and how do I find out what things I can change.

First let’s talk about what you can change. It’s beyond the scope of this article to go into all the things you can change with XUL. If you want to learn more about XUL, you can check out XULPlanet. For enterprise customization, there are probably two main things we would want to do: disable something or make it go away. We already know how to do disabling, but how would we make the Options… menuitem go away? The answer is the collapsed attribute:


This will make the menuitem go away completely.

OK, so we know how to change the XUL, let’s find out what we can change. You’ll notice that in order to change the menuitem, we needed to know the ID of the menuitem. So how can we find the ID of what we want to change? For this, we need to understand a little more about how the Firefox UI works. Most of the main Firefox window’s UI is contained in a file called browser.xul. By looking through this file, we can find various parts of the UI and use our knowledge of overlays to change them. For instance, looking through that file, we find out that the ID of the toolbar is toolbar-menubar. So if we wanted to make the menu go away, we could simply add:


Note that not only did we need to use the ID, but we had to use the name of the tag (toolbar) as well. You’ll notice that the menu is not in browser.xul (you won’t find menu_preferences, for instance). This is because the menu is contained in a separate file called browser-menubar.inc. You can consider this file to be a part of browser.xul for our purposes.

If you’re having trouble finding some UI in the XUL file, try this. Go to the Mozilla 1.8 Cross-Reference and search on the text you are trying to find. For instance, we’ll search on “Error Console.” This will return a DTD file that contains the string for the menu item (we want the one that begins with browser). On the same line as the text, you’ll see an identifier that usually ends in label. For the error console, it’s


By searching on the label, we can find the exact place where it is used in Firefox. In this case, it points us to browser-menubar.inc. We can use the information there to create an overlay that disables or removes the Error Console menuitem.

In the next installment, we’ll learn how to customize the default buttons on the toolbar.

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Posted in firefox | 1 Comment »

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