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At UW-Milwaukee's dorms, I used FFDeploy to do just this: create a silent Firefox installer for student and faculty machines with some built-in bookmark buttons for our student service websites, e-mail system and so on.

Doing this saves time and installs FF with a nice student-friendly UI right off the bat -- very useful in converting otherwise IE-centric students who don't care what browser they're using to Firefox.

You can change the location of the cache dir by setting the browser.cache.disk.parent_directory preference in about:config.

I've used a modification of the createprofile.vbs script from FFDeploy to set this up as new profiles are created from a login script.

I actually ended up creating my own msi files using a combination of regmon and filemon from Sysinternals to map it out, and Advanced Installer (the free version) to build the package. I ended up with a package that I can push out that includes flash and shockwave as well as a default profile with adblock included. I then use my version of the createprofile.vbs script in the users' login script to create an initial profile using the default one.

It takes a bit of effort to get right, but it's well worth it if you have a number of machines to push this out to. The bummer is that I only just got around to putting 1.0.7 out, and now 1.5 is out. Oh well.

Agreed.... at least I thought so, but recently while trying to deploy FF with group policies I came across Advanced Installer which is a free(beer) MSI authoring tool that makes it really simple to create MSI's. I've made my own custom MSI's for firefox using a combination of this and FFDeploy (well actually just the createProfile.vbs and manual method from it).

works like a charm.

A lot of people have seemed to think this question was about going totally Linux (and many claiming that the MS deal was a good "value").

In case the question was about using FOSS on a Windows network (for the time being), the following might help.

This tool is fairly useful for deploying Firefox on a network:

http://firefox.dbltree.com/

As for OpenOffice, I use central network location, see the setup guide (I think you have to run setup.exe with the -net option). I'm not sure what must be done from there to automate installation, we usually do it manually because Workstation installs of OOo (from a central network location) take seconds.

As for the question of whether the MS deal was a "good value". First, let me say that there's more to "value" than cost. Also realize that $50000 per year might be cheaper than MS's $15000. Once you figure in MSCE training for an IT team and the increased labor it takes to run a Windows network you might be surprised. Believe me, once configured, Linux machines can be dead reliable and reimaged lightning fast, I do it for a living. That said, Firefox has saved me 8 hours per week at one client that only has 10 computers.

Well, ask your purchasing department how many suppliers it has for, say, light bulbs. While more than a few places say "just one", I find universities in particular tend to have four or five suppliers solely for the purpose of leveraging one against the other for good pricing.

What's the point of my story? The point is that MS as a single supplier means you will pay as much as they want you to. Of course it will always be "a little cheaper". In a software world with real competition, that will change.

Regardless, it's worth pointing out that increasingly it is the case that people are choosing FOSS for reasons other than price:

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200504260 92929216

OK, now that so many home users have Firefox, and that it works really well, maybe it is time to tackle the corporate front?

FF could be made much easier and practical for administrators to deploy.

There is FFDeploy, but I would hope for something better and easier.

A possibility would be to allow some .ini file as argument to the install, specifying:

- profile location (with the possibility to leave out that stupid random directory name in the profile path),

- a cache directory separate from the profile folder and/or the right registry entries so the cache isn't copied over the network at every logon/logoff.

- extensions to be installed straight away,

- etc.

That .ini or whatever should also expand environment variables like %username%, %userprofile%, etc. (and $HOME etc. on Unix).

If you are deploying FF on your network, have you found a way to do it without going to every machine and setting it up manually?

It's not easy enough to deploy Firefox (or Thunderbird) in a corporate environment. And/or it's not documented well enough.

Next week, I would like to install both apps on 12 desktops running Win2K and XP.

12 is not 1000. I cannot spend 2 days finding how to do it, testing it, correcting, etc. I could install manually, but doing 12 times the same clicking around doesn't sound like fun (I'm not a mouse clicking fan either).

While I want settings to be in the user's profile, I need to make sure the web cache is elsewhere and isn't copied through the network at every logon/logoff.

I want to get rid of the moronic paths both apps use with "default" and "some-random-string".

I would like stuff in the Default Profile, so new users get it automatically.

This sort of thing doesn't look easy and straight-forward enough yet, and I'm sure that it is what is keeping many admins from deploying it on their desktops.

I will try it anyway, but I won't be able to bill the time I will have to spend researching how to do it right. Especially since the client didn't ask me to do that anyway. They are happy with MSIE. So I will spend time on my own cost, just to find how to install something that will hopefully generate less work for me in the future because I won't have to spend so much time cleaning infected machines because of MSIE.

I hope FFDeploy will help, but there doesn't seem to be such a thing for Thunderbird.

Last but not least: Firefox and Thunderbird are terrible memory hogs, with Firefox sometimes growing to insane memory usage levels (75 MB right now, but I've seen it go to 150!), and sometimes also crashing consuming 99% CPU. Fortunately, this last problem doesn't happen very often, but I will hate it when users on whom I forced Firefox call me on the phone because it crashed, so I can tell them to "press Ctrl-Alt-Del, select Firefox, click End Task, restart Firefox but-you-know-it's-a-much-better-and-more-secure-br owser"

I do believe it's a much better browser, and it's my default browser since it was called Phoenix, but instead of contemplating statisics, I think there is still a lot work to do to make it even better, and to help administartors actually deploying it.

Sounds like you'd like FFDeploy

Hi! I don't know anything about this kind of stuff, but is this what you're looking for?
It says "Automated deployment of Firefox with extensions, themes, and pre-configuration"

God bless! :)