October 27, 2006
Firefox 2 and Roaming Profiles
During the summer while ITS was facing a semi-crisis, we were trying to figure out why we were not installing Firefox on the Cluster computers throughout the Plymouth State University Campus. Zach established that Firefox stores the Cache and bookmarks in the same folder as your preferences locally on the system instead of allowing for roaming capabilities through network storage profiles.
I was interested to find out if there was a way around this because it would be so nice to have Firefox on the cluster machines. After doing research, I found out that Firefox 1.5 did not allow for roaming profiles. Once Firefox 2 was released to the world, we checked out how it handles roaming capabilities. They changed the way the cache is stored making it very easy for us to allow for roaming.
The original location for Firefox 1.5 preferences and cache were located in
“C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\{random-id}\”
With Firefox 2.0, they left the preferences in the original folder but moved the cache outside in its own folder, the following:
“C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\{random-id}\”
After talking with a co-worker, using group policy and our current roaming profiles, we can prevent the cache folder from being uploaded to the server on logout. Currently we are looking into recommending to Systems that they think about adding Firefox into the cluster image.
