Introduction

Note: these pages were originally written in the early 2000's when Netscape and pre-Firefox Mozilla were a thing. Lots of information is no longer relevant, such as registry.dat

Byteshifted mozilla.cfg is still supported (as of 2026), but no longer the recommended way of doing thing:

For modern deployments (on Windows), Mozilla/Firefox generally prefers:

policies.json for cross-platform enterprise configuration
Windows Group Policy for managed Windows installations
AutoConfig/mozilla.cfg when you need JavaScript logic or need to lock preferences not covered by the ordinary policy set

These pages describe how to customize mozilla for multi-user community. In the scenario described described, a bunch of client workstations running Windows access a Linux Samba server, on which the user's home directories are stored (under drive H:). Our goal is to make it possible to automatically generate a Mozilla configuration on the server for each user as soon as he is created. Moreover, we want to lock certain settings, so that users cannot change them.