Although this is technically a blog, it's primary content is a series of articles on how to get Firefox working in a corporate Windows environment. Later ones build on earlier ones, so you might want to use the Table of Contents on the right to read through it chronologically instead of reading straight down from here.

Upgrading to Firefox 14

I updated the site again for everything you need to do to push out Firefox 14.  Almost everything is exactly the same as it was for Firefox 9, so this is all you need to do:
  • Get a new MSI for Firefox 14.
  • Tweak it if you want.  The instructions are the same.
  • Get and edit XMarks 4.1.0.  I had problems using 4.0.5 with Firefox 14, but the instructions to edit 4.1.0 are the same.
  • Push them both out with Active Directory.  I found the PlainOldFavorites and IE Tab v2 plugins didn't need to be updated.
  • You're done.
The only other thing I added to the site was an explanation of how to push settings out per-user or per-machine.  I did this to turn off Firefox's new smooth scrolling feature on the remote desktop server.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Greg,
    Have you considered switching to ESR?
    I've been distributing FF via MSI from FrontMotion. Had to change some of our config files when we went from 3.6 to 5, since then I've skipped many of the minor monthly upgrades. I just recently decided to go with ESR10 in hope for more stable version. I'd like to know your take on it.
    Thanks
    Albert

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  2. It's definitely a path worth going down if you want to push out all the minor security releases without worrying about a potentially compatibility breaking upgrade that often.

    I considered it but I'm staying with the regular releases for now because now that Firefox just assumes plugins are compatible it's much less of a pain to switch between "major" versions. I'm not forced to repackage every plugin with an updated RDF file and push updates to them out too, I can just verify that they still work. In this case XMarks broke and needed to be redone but this shouldn't happen every time.

    I definitely dragged my feet too long in getting off 9. I'm going to try to keep up more going forward, and if it becomes a burden I'll switch to ESR.

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