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Martin Andel

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Prevent domain users from installing Firefox add-ons / Centrally manage and unistall add-ons

Hi,

Is there any way to stop the users installing the Firefox add-ons/extensions in a domain environment? And if they have already installed some, can they be remotely removed or at least disabled?

Many thanks,

Martin
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sammySeltzer
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Retrict their permission levels to just Standard users or at the very most, Power Users.

But first, you go and remove to disable the current adds-on before modifying their permission levels or else I doubt they will be able to after you remove their ability to install stuff.
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Martin Andel

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They all only have user level permissions and yet they are able to install Firefox add-ons. I suspect that happens because: 1) changes in Firefox aren't being written to registry and 2) Firefox add-ons aren't executables as such.
Well, the best you can probably do is to sabotage the use of firefox.

That is, if you are a developer, and write software, you can code it to NOT work with firefox.

Quite frankly, it is a tough call to try and block the installation of firefox.

Even Microsoft has tried with limited success. You can come of with .exe to block and they can create a folder, dump it into that folder and install it from there.

Your company can come up with a policy to outlaw the use of firefox.

That might prevent most but not all from installing and using it.

What beef do you have with it anyway?

Just curious.
I personally love Firefox and the fact is that some our company's websites are most optimized for it. That is why we actually encourage our employees using it.

My beef is that some of them (our employees) are connecting to TOR using a Firefox add-on. And apart from that being bad enough, they use it to access websites that our content filter specifically blocks. Very upsetting that!
Well, I am not sure how this prevents everyone but you can someone find a way to push this fix to domain accounts, it would help you alot.

Try it and see how it works for you.

http://www.jkwebtalks.com/2009/09/how-to-prevent-installation-of-add-ons.html
Yes, I've been looking at that. But I think that option had been taken out of later versions of FF.

This appears to be the new way of doing it: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/888009

Problem is that it doesn't make much sense to me...
Maybe, this link which is an offshoot of it, walks you through some steps of using the features.

I think that the biggest thing is to have firefox browser open, then hitting Ctl+Shift+A will open the environment where you can begin implement the steps enumerated on this link:

http://mike.kaply.com/2012/07/03/customizing-firefox-blocking-add-ons/
I think you can pretty much the files where changes need to be made here:

C:\Program Files\mozilla.org\Mozilla\defaults\pref\

including this :  all.js

More here:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Automatic_Mozilla_Configurator/Locked_config_settings

One of these links hopefully, should help you resolve the problems you are having.
Ok, I'll research it and come back. Thanks!
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Martin Andel

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After much research based on discussion with the involved experts, my solution was simply the most complete one.