991456 - Directory Tiles should be turn off by default in the ESR.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[dsatbugzilla]

Directory Tiles, ads and Telemetry should be turned off by default in the ESR. Advertisements, suggestions to visit facebook and such are not appropriate in a browser used in a business.  If these items are not turned off my default there will a large burden placed on the IT staff during the update.

Comment 1

[:Gijs (back August 25; he/him)]

I don't know whether I agree with comment #0, but either way, radaring this to tiles folks... Ed, got ideas about this? :-)

Comment 2

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

Businesses have the ability to modify the preferences prior to imaging machines, which will allow them to turn off directory tiles if they so need to.

Comment #0 is proposing something similar to disabling the Google search engine default for ESR. Pretty sure this is wontfix.

Comment 3

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

I'll defer to clarkbw, but I would assume given the preference path as suggested in comment 2, we don't need to do anything special for ESR.

In fact, you could populate the tiles with company-specific tiles so that new employees automatically get links to important company pages.

Comment 4

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

(In reply to Ed Lee :Mardak from comment #3)
> I'll defer to clarkbw, but I would assume given the preference path as
> suggested in comment 2, we don't need to do anything special for ESR.

Right, if you want to continue with empty tiles you could set the prefs like so:
browser.newtabpage.directorySource = "data:application/json,{}"

> In fact, you could populate the tiles with company-specific tiles so that
> new employees automatically get links to important company pages.

We should put this up on the wiki somewhere.  I'm talking with our Mozilla Help Desk people about this use case.  When we build a machine for a new hire we can try having company internal Tiles for sites that matter only to Mozilla employees; intranet etc.

Given the pref above I'm going to mark this wontfix because I feel you have a solution to turn it off completely.  Also we should have a solution for you to offer tiles you feel are appropriate for your environment which could be a big improvement.

Ed, can you offer the best method for setting a local set of Tiles via the prefs?  Would it be inline like "data:application/json,{}" or referencing some JSON file in the profile?

Comment 5

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

I wrote up some instructions for customizing the Directory Tiles preferences https://wiki.mozilla.org/Directory_Tiles