Rolling Out Mozilla in an Organization?

jdclucidly asks: "I am a network administrator for a small non-profit (about 50 employees). I would like to roll Mozilla 1.2.1 out to all of our desktops. We don't have a single ghost image because the computers on site are too varied. Yes, I did my Googling. The source for the installer is just huge and mind boggling. Is there something like a Mozilla Administration Kit that will generate custom Mozilla installers? If not, would people on Slashdot be interested in starting a new project to make such a kit?" If you were going to deploy a "branded" version of Mozilla, company-wide, how would you do it, especially if you had to worry about a mixed OS environment?

"Here's what I want to do:

• Install everything but Quality Feedback Agent
• Set Mozilla as the default browser
• Disable 'Open Unrequested Windows' (kill pop-ups)
• Install Elveraldo's Crystal-Classic theme as default
• Set Google as the default search engine
• Set 'Georgia' as the default Serif font for Western and Unicode
• Enable HTTP Pipelining
• Enable FIPS internal cryptography
• Set toolbar to 'Pictures only'
• Set Home Page to my organization's intranet site
• Set start page to 'Blank page'
• Disable 'Hide the tab bar'
• Enable Middle-click for new tab
• Enable control+enter for new tab
• Default downloads to 'open a progress dialog'
• Disable Javascript and Plugins for Mail & News
• Enable quicklaunch
• Create an additional shortcut on the desktop and in quicklaunch that uses chrome/icons/mailnew.ico as it's source and points to 'mozilla.exe -mail'

As you can imagine, doing this on 50 computers (and making sure I got each of these) would be quite tedious. Are, there others out there that want to do the same thing. I checked the Mozilla newgroups. I checked the CCK Project page at Mozilla.org -- it appears to be pretty inactive. I checked out the Netscape 7 CCK, which is pretty robust but doesn't do everything I want and it's proprietary -- plus, I don't want all the NS7 proprietary crap on my network.

I installed Mozilla on my machine using the stub installer and had it save all of the .XPI components to a folder. I went in and extracted the .XPI's and examined them. It seems possible to do these things but not without learning XUL, JavaScript, XML and Mozilla.org's own stuffings -- not to mention setting up a Visual C++/Cygwin compiling farm for every next Mozilla release. Can I:

• Directly modify the defaults/prefs/all.js file to incorporate my preference defaults above and then recompress the .XPI?
• Add to the installer Crystal-Classic.jar somehow? Where are those changes made?
• Make the installer NOT allow the user to change any of this?
• Make the installer create the above mentioned shortcut?"

Comments

Re:Don't use Mozilla

[pavera]

everyone is always praising phoenix, however, on my machine it uses more RAM (about 26MB compared to 20 for mozilla) it isn't noticably faster, and there isn't an option to ctrl+enter in the location bar to open a new tab, ctrl+enter in phoenix does the same as in IE (adds http://www. to the front and .com to the end of whatever is in the location bar) which is a nice shortcut, but I'm too addicted to ctrl+enter creating a new tab, so phoenix's usability suffers for me, and I don't get alot of speed increases anyway...

Ok, I'll take a shot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why make it harder than you need to? How about this:

Make one install on your PC. Setup all of the preferences how you want them.

Copy the .mozilla directory (or whatever) to wherever you plan on installing this from. chmod a-w on it for *nix users, set permissions accordingly on it for Windows.

Put your .jar theme where it needs to be

Install on everyone else's PCs and just copy the preferences folder via a script or by hand.

Profit!

It such a small number of people, it should be painless to do it by hand anyways.

It' won't be easy...

[weave]

I tried, went through hell. I assume you're doing this in a Windows environment. If so, be aware of some real killer limitations.

First of all, Mozilla doesn't understand UNC paths. If your GPO redirects %appdata%, you're screwed. Quit now. The mozilla registry.dat file goes in %appdata%\mozilla and if %appdata% is in a UNC of DFS share, it won't find it.

Then ... if you allow users to create profiles in the default location, below %appdata%\mozilla, expect profiles to go missing. Windows has a nasty habit of duplicating roaming profiles, like profiles\user, profiles\user.domain, profiles\user.domain.000, etc... Since your profile location is a hardcoded path in registry.dat, Mozilla will find it, but will try to load the profile in the stale profile location. If that doesn't exist now, it'll throw up a profile manager asking you to recreate one.

The solution to above is to create the profile manually via a command like:

mozilla.exe -CreateProfile "default z:\mozilla"

That will move the bulk of the profile (except registry.dat) to a fixed location out of the roaming profile.

For a lot more detail and my rant, read bug #162025, comment #28.

We have done a lot to get it working finally, including some logon vbscripts to create the profiles, repair prefs.js file, have some mandatory prefs.js entries that are replaced during logon if user changes them (like home page for us), etc...

We've been through hell but think we finally have it licked by working around mozilla bugs. We intend to post a page on our experiences, but not in the next 12 hours (the effective life of a slashdot story)

When it's ready, I'll e-mail you or feel free to contact me if you want the scripts as they stand now (we are still debugging some things).

Some simple ideas.

[The Creator]

First install mozilla on one machine. Then obtain the source, find where the signal handler(i think that is what it is called) for the meny ithem edit->preferences is set and comment that out, compile. Now you should have a version of mozilla that the user cannot configure.

Use the first installation(full version) to generate all the files that contain the settings you want for each machine. And copy them to each machine after installing the crippled mozilla on them.

You should be able to achiave your goals like this, if each machine requires uniqe settings(email and such) then you have some work to do, but it should'nt be impossible.

Win32 architecture solution...

[MoThugz]

Being the M$ lowlife that I am, I can only recommend something for your rollout on Windows-based clients.

I recommend using InstallRite by Epsilon Squared Inc. to automate installation of any application on multiple PCs with different hardware and software configurations.

It's easy to use and the documentation is good, IMHO. A big plus is that it is Freeware. Checking it out might be beneficial to you.

Ask Ben over a Beonex.com

[BroadbandBradley]

Beonex is a consulting company working on this very issue. They have the start of roaming profile support working in mozilla, and create thier own browser Beonex communicator for this purpose.
Check out this bug on bugzilla where the start of roaming profile code exists for your compiling and testing pleasure. roaming profile setup IMHO is the way to go if folks use at different machines at different times. Outside of what's in the works...for now, I'd manually configure one for each platform and copy the folder over. Several different XPI's can be rolled into one, but it does take some hacking skills.
Later this year, Hopefully, roaming will be up and running in Mozilla and with that bwill likely come some nice deployment tools.

Re:just copy the directory

[Vaughn Anderson]

If this is totally true, and you can just copy the directory then all you have to deal with is this-
Buy Wise installer or some other installer App (perhaps 1 for each OS, can't imagine it would be more than 3)

1) If what was stated is true (that you can simply copy the folders) then make an installer based on your one computer's Moz setup.

2) This will compress your files.

3) You can add any extra files you want (.jar or otherwise) Install those as well, or even make seperate installers for the jar files, and simply include them in the installer. You can put these files anywhere you want on their system as well, simple point, click and naming folders and such, it's very easy.

4) Any variations of versions of an OS (say windows 95 vs Windows XP) can be detected using scripting in the Wise installer (or hopefully any other installer you use) and then you can install different files based on the version of the OS.

5) You would maintain total control of how the installer puts files on the end users computer. (One installer I made when ran, didn't ask the user anything, just opened up, installed the files and then closed.)

6) Any and all shortcuts, and folder groups are all super cake and easy to setup with a good installer application. I highly recommend wise if you do any installing on windows.

7) A simple wise for windows installer 4 standard edition is $450, with all the power and ease of use you get for it, you will find it can help you with many other things to install besides this. You can make installers to install installers, just to get past people screwing up things. :) (like automated button clicks and the such) though I have only experimented with these things a little.

8) If you have the money and the time to learn the more robust installers, you may be able to do even more than the above.

-v