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anx
Asked: 2018-03-24 17:58:50 +0800 CST

Why does Firefox 59 ignore my syspref.js?

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Recently, my /etc/firefox/syspref.js stopped being applied. Unlike on Windows, where configuration errors results in

Failed to read the configuration file. Please contact your system administrator.

on my Ubuntu machines, firefox just silently ignores my settings. Launching with the -jsconsole switch reveals

** Preference parsing error (line 1) = non-matching string **

I did not make any changes to my /etc/firefox/syspref.js file. It did work in Firefox 58 and stopped working with the first Firefox 59 version. My file contains

// first line is ignored
lockPref("browser.startup.homepage", "https://example.org/");

What can i do to

  1. temporarily mitigate the problem: Make firefox read my config again?
  2. permanently solve the problem: Prevent firefox from starting with invalid configuration when it encounters syntax errors in my system-wide config?
firefox 16.04

2 Answers

  1. I found out that you now have to use pref("...","...",locked); instead of lockPref("...","...");.

    Example syspref.js (working in Firefox 61 on Linux Mint):

    pref("browser.startup.homepage", "http://...", locked);
pref("network.proxy.autoconfig_url", "http://...", locked);
pref("network.proxy.type", 2, locked);
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  2. In recent versions, it seems that Mozilla changed the managed preferences again. My syspref.js is ignored in version 98. Now, you have to use the JSON policies (create a file /etc/firefox/policies/policies.json with some setting described in the linked GitHub repo).

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