Recently I was asked if there was a way to allow only certain sites to install add-ons but block any other sites that try to install add-ons. While Firefox does not have a built in way to do this, I was able to figure something out.

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Recently in response to this post about integrating add-ons into Firefox, I was asked why some add-ons don't work properly in the distribution directory. That's a great question and it deserves its own post.

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In an earlier post, I showed how to disable safe mode, but unfortunately that method doesn't work anymore. I've since discovered a way to disable safe mode. It's not as good as before, but it does work. I'm going to assume that you've read the earlier article as well as this article about customizing Firefox by writing a simple extension.

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I just want to remind people that read my blog that Firefox 17 is the next Extended Support Release for Firefox. It's currently available in the beta channel. You should be testing with this. A lot. (I would hope you started testing when Firefox 17 was in the Aurora Channel).

The Firefox 10 ESR will be supported for 12 weeks after Firefox 17 to give you time to test and deploy, but if there are major issues you need to find them now.

PLEASE don't put off testing Firefox 17 until the ESR is released.

You also need to know about some Firefox changes that will affect you.

• Customized preferences file should go in defaults/preferences, NOT defaults/prefs. I've mentioned this before, but it's worth repeating.
• It is no longer possible to prevent the safe mode dialog via the method I posted here. There is no way to prevent a user from entering safe mode. A bug has been opened.
• Changing application.ini no longer works. I know people were using it to disable the crash reporter. They were also using this method to modify Firefox to coexist with another Firefox (different profile directory, appname, etc.). There are workarounds for this, but they involve passing a parameter when you start Firefox. Take a look at bug 723493 for more details.
• The ability for a user to switch to tabs on bottom has been removed completely, but it can still be done via a preference (browser.tabs.onTop).

I will be updating the CCK Wizard soon to make sure it works properly with Firefox 17.

Recently I've seen a lot of questions around why defaultPref in an autoconfig file doesn't work to set the Firefox hompage. For example this:

defaultPref("browser.startup.homepage", "http://mike.kaply.com");

does not work.

This post should clear things up (and show you how to make it work).

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Have you ever noticed that even if you change your search engine in the upper right search box, searches from the URL bar (using '?' or multiple words) still use Google? In older versions of Firefox, you had to mess with the keyword.URL preference to change this, but things are much easier now.
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As part of my effort to dump Google Chrome, I deleted my old Google Chrome profiles so that I could create a new empty one for the sole purpose of working on the few add-ons that I'm already working on. Every time I created a new profile in Chrome, I would get extensions in that profile that I didn't install (a Conduit toolbar and an extension called General Crawler). I looked in the control panel, but no apps referenced these extensions and nothing I uninstalled fixed the problem. After some digging, I found out how this was happening and wanted to share.

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Before we start, I have a confession to make. I was a Chrome user. As part of my job, I open and close Firefox a lot and it was simply easier to use a browser other than Firefox for my day to day browsing. After what Google has done recently, though, I have no interest in supporting them by using their browser. Here's why.

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Update: I've uploaded an even newer version (1.3.5b4) that adds support for removing default bookmarks.

I have made a new version of the CCK Wizard (1.3.5b3) available for testing. It's available on the Download page at Google code.

I have made a major change to when the CCK is initialized in order to workaround a change to how bookmarks are imported in Firefox 14. That Firefox change caused the CCK to not add bookmarks to the toolbar at all. I don't foresee a problem, but please double check that your preferences, bookmarks and registry entities are properly set.

I have also added the single most requested feature to the CCK Wizard - you can make the following modifications to the Firefox UI:

• Display Bookmarks Toolbar by default
• Display Add-on Bar by default
• Display the Menu Bar (on Windows) by default
• Have tabs on bottom by default

These only apply the first time the browser is started or the CCK is installed, and a user can override them. Also, the bookmarks toolbar will display by default anyway if you have specified items on the bookmarks toolbar (this is how it worked in the past).

PLEASE test this. I'd like to get this one released soon.

If you are running into problems with Firefox 14 not honoring values in you set the default preferences, it's because Firefox preference files have moved from defaults/pref to defaults/preferences and your files have to move as well. (See bug 779437.)

Apparently custom changes to the default preferences were supposed to be there all along, but no one actually knew that (not even Firefox).

So when you are creating JS files for your autoconfig settings or to set the various add-on scopes values, make sure they are in defaults/preferences. (You'll have to create this directory.) Note that this method works fine on Firefox 10 as well. I'll be updating all my posts as I have time.

On a separate note, the CCK is broke on Firefox 14 - it's not creating bookmarks properly. I've tracked the problem down to a Places change, but at this point I am unable to work around it. I've contacted the developer that made the change that broke me, but I haven't heard back. Hopefully he'll be able to point me in the right direction.

I can't stress this enough. PLEASE test on Aurora and Beta if you have the bandwidth to do so. These Firefox 14 issuse should not have been found after Firefox 14 was released. And yes, I'll admit that I've been failing in my testing as well, but to be blunt, I'm not paid for any of the time I spend on enterprise, so it's not one of my top priorities.