by Martin Brinkmann on August 15, 2018 in Firefox – No comments
Mozilla added a Policy Engine to Firefox 60.0 to help organizations with the deployment of the Firefox web browser. Aimed at organizations, most policies are available in home environments as well.
While Firefox 60 does support the Windows Group Policy as well, it is the Policy Engine that is favored by many as it is operating system agnostic.
Administrators can create policy files manually or use the excellent Enterprise Policy Generator for that instead which simplifies things significantly.
About:policies lists all active policies, displays errors the engine encountered when it parsed the policy file, and policy documentation.
about:policies
Mozilla plans to include the internal page about:policies in Firefox 63 to list enabled policies in the browser, list errors, and provide documentation on the feature.
Firefox 63 will be released on October 23, 2018 according to the Firefox release schedule.
You can verify the version with a click on Menu > Help > About Firefox. Note that this may perform a check for updates as well. Another option that you have is to load about:support and check the version on that page instead.
Just type about:policies to open the new interface in the active tab in the Firefox browser. Firefox lists all active policies on start. Policies are sorted into groups to improve identification.
Note that it is not possible to edit policies on that page; the page is informational only.
An “Errors” link is displayed if any of the policies of the policies file threw errors when the policies were loaded into the Firefox browser. The Errors page is not displayed if there are not any.
Administrators can open about:policies to check for errors quickly. Errors are listed with information so that it is usually straightforward to correct them. The error message highlights the policy that is erroneous and offers a short description of the error. The two policies on the screenshot above could not be applied because they had invalid parameters.
Documentation is the third and final link that is on the about:policies page. It lists all supported policies, a short description, and even some example code or information to assist with the implementation of the policy.
Closing Words
Firefox 63 is the target for the new about:policies page. The page serves two main purposes: to list active policies so that users and administrators can identify all policies that are active easily from within Firefox, and to highlight any errors in the policy file itself so that administrators can correct those before the policies get deployed to user systems.
The new page is a welcome addition to Firefox as it improves the visibility of policies in Firefox and helps administrators verify policy files before deployment.