Reset Firefox preserving bookmarks on many machines

Mar 09, '11 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: kdog79

Sometimes, Firefox bounces in the Dock and will not open. Either a new Firefox version has been pushed out to the machine, or some Firefox settings have changed. If it's on a personal machine, it's pretty easy to handle. What if it happens on a corporate network with many users, and you must repair them all?

Here is a solution so that a user clicks on the Scripts menu in the menu bar and selects a script from a drop down menu called Reset Firefox.

A pop-up dialog box asks the user 'Do you wish to reset Firefox,' with Yes and No buttons. The user clicks Yes and another dialog pops up 'Just leave the script to do its stuff. Firefox will open with instructions on how to restore your Bookmarks.' with an OK button.

The user clicks OK and waits, and after a short period, Firefox opens as a new user would see it asking the normal setup questions like do you wish to import anything, set the default browser, etc. Then a web page automatically opens which is a Mozilla KB article telling them how to reset their bookmarks.

How to set it up:


One problem is you need the Scripts menu showing in every users screen on all the machines in the company. To do this we use mcx with Apples Workgroup manager.

Open AppleScript Editor and go to Preferences and tick the box 'Show scripts menu in the Menu bar.'

Navigate to your Preferences directory and copy the file com.apple.systemuiserver.plist to your desktop and using Property list editor (which comes with Apple's Developer Tools) open it and make sure you have under the menuExtras key the entry /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/Script Menu.menu and save it.

Add the com.apple.systemuiserver.plist to all Computer Groups in Workgroup Manager and when importing it select always.

Next time the machines reboot it will be in the users Menu bar always and you can just publish simple instructions on your company's intranet. This way if a user has a problem just point them to the Intranet page and let them do it.

[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one. Obviously this is targeted to enterprise deployment and it's complete overkill to do all of this for just a few machines. Still, it's good to see hints sometimes aimed at the large-scale network. If it were me, I'd skip the steps using vi and create the script using BBEdit or TextWrangler.

P.S. This was a very complex hint to edit so if there are errors please let me know in the comments so I can fix them.]

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