I was trying recently to configure Personalization for the Firefox web browser at a client that uses it quite heavily. They’ve done a lot of customization inside of Firefox and have made good use out of Add-Ons like NoScript, AdBlock and IETab, so it was imperative that they could continue to use it in their AppSense implementation.
However, once Firefox was added to the Personalization Group for the users, even though data was being written back to Personalization Server, the program itself seemed very unstable. It also seemed to ignore a lot of settings. Sometimes it would fail to start, history would be lost, add-ons wouldn’t load – in general, it was almost unusable compared to the thick-client version they had gotten used to. Clearly something wasn’t configured correctly.
After a lot of searching, it turns out we needed to add a whole bunch of Registry keys to Session Data, as various Firefox settings are used outside of the process itself. Also, initially strangely, there was an Internet Explorer Registry key to be added. However, when you consider that Firefox has to let Internet Explorer know that it is the default browser, it makes a bit more sense.
The Registry keys that need to be added to Session Data (or Desktop Settings, if you are still at a version of EM prior to 8.0.959) are listed below:-
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\.htm
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\.html
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\.shtml
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\.xht
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\.xhtm
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\.xhtml
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\.webm
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\FirefoxHTML
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\FirefoxURL
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\ftp
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\gopher
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\http
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\https
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\StartMenuInternet
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Associations
Once you’ve got all these configured and added to Session Data, you should see Firefox starting to behave normally under Personalization. Which for this client, due to the amount of time they’d invested into customizing their browser environment for the users, was really good news.
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