Firefox 60 Is The Next ESR Release, Introducing Policy Engine

[schmidtbag]

With geolocation and desktop notifications, I don't disable them for privacy concerns. I disable them because they annoy the ($*%&()$%&$ out of me. I'm interested in allowing geolocation services and desktop notifications to about 3% of the websites I visit, which means I see 30 or so requests to share my location or enable notifications that I have to click 'No' to or scroll past for every 1 that I care about. After a few years of that, I just shut the features off. I presume my wife and kids do the same.

Fair point - at least you aren't a tin-foil hat wearer (like some people here). But, this is one of those things where just because you don't like it, that doesn't mean you have to go out of your way to address it for your family, because maybe they don't care. If they express their annoyance, then sure, it'd be worth looking into.

With DDG vs Google, I've heard the problem called "the tyranny of the default". The overwhelming majority of users stay with the default settings and don't change unless they have a specific reason. I could set the default search engine to just about anything that doesn't completely suck and suggest some other search engine and they wouldn't change it.

With DDG vs Google, people have overwhelmingly chose Google's search engine even before Chrome existed. Despite people's opinions of Google and the sketchy practices Google does in the background, their search engine is powerful, and caters to idiots. This isn't a "tyranny of the default", this is just what people have always done. I'm not saying Google deserves to be the #1 choice and I have nothing against DDG (or other alternatives) but I also have yet to find a compelling reason to use alternatives.

The best protection is education. I can't insulate them from everything, I can only really prepare them to deal with it when they see it.

I totally agree, but are you really educating them if you pre-set everything for them? That's kinda my point. As long as you have your own separate computer in the event the kids screw something up, let that screwup be a learning experience to them. But again - obviously you need to step in at some point, since the internet is a dangerous place and some mistakes require wisdom vs experience.

In another light: educate them of the things you'd like them to practice or be aware of. That way, you never have to manually tweak their accounts - they can do it themselves.

I'm somewhat familiar with sed and bash scripting, the problem is that most of your ~/.mozilla profile data isn't generated until after you've opened the browser. So I need to manually log in to each account and open firefox, then manually configure it (or close it and script the configuration). I would much prefer to have some mechanism to configure Firefox before it's ever opened, but the last time I checked there is nothing like that.

Just sudo into their account, run Firefox long enough to generate ~/.mozilla, kill it, and then run the commands.

[grok]

I think sudo might have trouble running it by itself unless you play with xhosts security etc.
But you can do ssh -X user2@localhost if you want to be lazy (needs openssh-server installed though, then uninstall or disable or configure after the fact. I think an sshd that only takes connections from localhost would be fun)