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Stopping ChatZilla Installs on FireFox Systems?
TonalSpeller asks: "I'm in charge of a language learning computer lab in an Asian university. We have Windows XP on all machines, but I convinced my superior that I needed to hide Internet Explorer on all student machines (can't remove it entirely because some proprietary software might need access to it). I'm counting on security through obscurity -- I know that a minority of savvy people can still access IE via the command line. I am running the latest version of Opera and Firefox 1.0 PR on all machines, but now I am faced with a dilemma -- extending Firefox is so easy that sooner or later, someone will try to install Chatzilla. Is there any easy way to block Javascript while keeping Firefox's superb usability? I will be running TrustNoExe, but that won't catch Mozilla extensions. Any ideas or suggestions?"
"I have also removed all chat clients, games and Outlook Express so that people can concentrate on language learning (I don't want people using all this expensive hardware to goof off). I work hard to create interesting lessons, but I won't get a chance to teach anything if students are immersed in irrelevant conversations."
you should try to build / get someone to build you a version without Tools - Extensions menu item.
Haven't tried this myself, but couldn't you just setup file permissions so the user accounts don't have permission to write to the config file and change the settings?
Won't setting xpinstall.enabled to false do the trick? (Type about:config in the url-box-location-bar-whatever-it's-called.) Then lock down the configuration.
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
Firefox supports a whitelist of sites that you can xpinstall from. This was added in the Preview Release, I believe. If you look in the release notes of that version, there should be more information on the whitelist and how to change its contents. Emptying the whitelist will effectively disable installing extensions.
Sorry, that's 'xpinstall.enabled' = false