Change Firefox defaults inside the application itself

Jun 27, '05 09:18:00AM

Contributed by: magicsloth

If you want to set up default settings for Firefox for users on a system who haven't launched the app before -- perhaps for a computer lab where you want all users to have the same initial bookmarks setup -- you can actually change this inside the .app file itself. First, set up Firefox the way you want it in your user account, or via a temporary account (it is easiest if you do this from an administrative account). Then, as an administrator, open up Terminal and type:

cd /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/defaults/profile/
Next copy any files from your Firefox profile to this directory. Your Firefox profile should be located in your user's Library folder, on this path: /Users -> your_username -> Library -> Application Support -> Firefox -> Profiles -> xxxxxxxx.default, where xxxxxxxx is some random string of characters. An easy way to copy these files is to use Terminal and type cp[space], and then drag the file from the Firefox profile directory onto the Terminal window to auto-insert the path, and then follow that up with another space and a period. The final command should look something like this (shown on two rows for a narrower display; there's a space between Application and Support, but nowhere else):
cp /Users/username/Library/Application 
 Support/Firefox/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default/bookmarks.html .
Press Enter, and your bookmarks file (or whatever else you copied) will now be the default built into your Firefox.app. It wouldn't hurt to do a ln -la and make sure that the files you copy are the same owner as the rest of the Firefox app. This will work in Tiger and Panther. It should probably work in earlier versions as well.

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