To clarify, our major point is to set up a default homepage. I believe that is a task useful in general, e.g. in a school lab. We haven't found any better to way than to repack omni.ja during boot, and that is a very ugly approach. Maybe we have missed something?

We set these properties at the moment (an extract from attachment 755229 [details]):
browser.startup.homepage=https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:Current | http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=fedora-test-day
pref("startup.homepage_welcome_url","");
pref("startup.homepage_override_url","");
pref("browser.rights.3.shown", true);

There's such config location (/usr/lib(64)/firefox/defaults/preferences/) but it apparently does not work for the homepage.

(In reply to Martin Stransky from comment #2)
> There's such config location (/usr/lib(64)/firefox/defaults/preferences/)
> but it apparently does not work for the homepage.

If that worked for homepage (and other options), that would be satisfactory for our Test Day Live image purposes. But it wouldn't help a sysadmin, because those files would be overwritten with each firefox update.

It seems that Firefox doesn't contain any configuration files at all:
$ rpm -qc firefox
$ 

I don't know how Firefox is packaged in Debian or other high-profile distributions (I can check if needed), but I just don't understand how sysadmins configure Firefox in Fedora?

On 10/22/2013 01:06 AM, Adam Williamson wrote:> Hi, folks. Just curious about this. I'm fixing (I hope...) the test day
> kickstart's method of overriding the Firefox home page. At present it
> unpacks and re-packs omni.ja to set this and a few other preferences; as
> far as I can tell, it could quite easily not bother with that, and just
> dump a .js file in $libdir/firefox/browser/defaults/preferences
> containing the preferences it wants set, and that will override omni.ja
> just fine.
> 
> In figuring this out, I came across this blog:
> 
> http://mike.kaply.com/2013/05/06/dont-unpack-and-repack-omni-jar/
> 
> given that, I wondered if there's a reason we 'trojan' omni.ja with our
> distro-specific preferences in the firefox spec, rather than leaving it
> clean as per upstream and putting our preferences in an override file?
>

As per above, I found in building an F20 live image that just putting the home page in a .js file in /usr/lib(64)/firefox/defaults/preferences/ works fine, now (and the way the kickstart currently does it no longer works). I suspect it's because of this change in the firefox spec:

http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/firefox.git/commit/?id=ec429e944715fe7a0471a68f225b35e267fe8d67

i.e. our package now sets the default home page as a pref and not by hacking browserconfig.properties . I'll commit this change to spin-kickstarts.

Still, I guess this bug report can remain open, because the problem of a site admin not having anywhere good to override default properties still remains.

This might be related to: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1170092

firefox-45.0.1-4.fc24 has been submitted as an update to Fedora 24. https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2016-eae761f28d

firefox-45.0.1-4.fc24 has been pushed to the Fedora 24 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Updates_Testing for
instructions on how to install test updates.
You can provide feedback for this update here: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2016-eae761f28d

firefox-45.0.1-4.fc24 has been pushed to the Fedora 24 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.

Hi Martin, how exactly is this fixed? I still see no /etc directory in the package:

$ rpm -ql firefox | grep /etc
$ rpm -q firefox
firefox-45.0.1-2.fc23.x86_64

Does it work in a different way? I don't see it in "man firefox".
Thanks.

Doh, I misread the version number, sorry! Now I see it:

$ rpm -ql firefox | grep /etc
/etc/firefox/pref
$ rpm -q firefox
firefox-45.0.1-4.fc24.x86_64