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Lock Firefox Settings on public computers

Everyone is able to download all the files that he wants and change the preferences of your Firefox browser if he gets access to it. It could be family members that tend to use your profile and add bookmarks to it and change the layout or a public computer in an internet cafe that needs to be protected from users who like to add bookmarks with explicit content or change the startup page to a explicit image or website.

Public Fox is a extension for Firefox that makes it possible to lock some of the settings in Firefox preventing users without the master password to change them. You can lock the bookmarks, add-ons window, Firefox options, about:config dialog and downloads. Please note that only downloads with defined extensions will be locked, just add a listing of extensions separated by “,” to the list and enable lock downloads for this to work.

You should add a lock password to make it secure. If you forget the lock password you could run Firefox in safemode by using the parameters -safe-mode. This is not a fool proof method, if the user has access to the Firefox profile folder for instance he could delete the extension and restart Firefox. (not tested but should work)

This is mainly a great way of keeping users with little experience from changing settings in Firefox and downloading harmful files.

found: genbeta

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About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.

Author: , Thursday February 1, 2007 -
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Responses so far:

  1. gnome says:

    Brilliant!

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