1835720 - Add support for bootstrapping a profile with an enterprise policy

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Enterprise Policies, enhancement, P5)

Description

[alex]

An enterprise policy can be used as a clean way to bootstrap a new Firefox profile, install addons, set some defaults using the policy, and even change settings by adding a firefox.cfg file. However, adding an Enterprise policy requires write access to the installation directory and affects all current and future profiles.

It would be nice to have a way to bootstrap a new profile with a policy. For example, you could create an empty profile directory, place policies.json and firefox.cfg in that directory, and Firefox would create the profile with that policy on the first start.

Currently, you can bootstrap a profile with a prefs.js file, but installing addons requires setting addons.autoDisableScopes and placing the addons as files in the exact right place with the right name, i.e. the addon ID, which does not always contain a readable addon name.

Using the policies method would be much cleaner, as it is a nice format with good documentation for describing profile invariants like addon to install, settings to enable/disable, and so on.

Firefox should delete (or ignore) the policies.json file in the profile directory after the first start, and don't apply it on every start like the policies in the installation directory, so the user can change things and especially bootstrap completely different profiles

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Firefox::Enterprise Policies' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Simona Badau, Desktop QA, PTO 22-30June]

Setting this enhancement request to NEW, enabling the engineering team to evaluate whether it should be considered for implementation or not.