hi daneklad, if the purpose is to lock a certain network configuration and deploy that to a number of machines, then the method described in http://kb.mozillazine.org/Locking_preferences is the best way to go about that. merely hiding the network panel isn't ideal, since that could be circumvented by directly editing the preferences file...

I agree with you....i can just lock the preference itself. Out of curiosity....if i did want to hide something like that, how would i go about it?

since the about:preferences page is like a displayed website, you can "hide" a section by adjusting the css files like on any other websites with a userContent.css file. this for example would hide the Network-button in options > advanced:

@-moz-document url-prefix(about:preferences){
#networkTab {display:none!important;}
}

the disadvantage is, that the userContent.css file is profile specific, so you'd have to find a way to put that reliably into the profile folder of each user & as already indicated there are various ways around that (modifying preferences in about:config, starting firefox in safemode also disables userContent.css modifications, since the users usually have write-access in their profile folder, they can also tamper with the file itself, etc...)

I am deploying this as an app-v package, so I can control the variable, however I will just set the network preferences instead of hiding the tab. If I wanted to stop users saving passwords within the browser, would I have to find the key in the about:config and change the value then lock it or is there another method to do it?

generally the process is, finding which about:config entry controls the behaviour, and then configuring that accordingly with the lock-file you created. you can put the following line into your *.cfg lock file to disallow the saving of passwords in the firefox passwords manager:

//disable storage of passwords
lockPref("signon.rememberSignons", true);

Ah perfect!! Final question...this is the one that is bugging me....I want to import a certificate that must go to all users...ive been reading about the nss tool that you have to use...is that correct? and where can I download it from if that is correct? Thanks for all your help so far!

daneklad said

I have tried messing around with the userchrome.css file but to no success...there seems to be conflicting syntax posted on the internet of how to do this.

The correct name of that file would be userChrome.css - with the lowercase c Firefox won't recognize it as a valid userChrome.css file.

Same thing with userContent.css.

Whenever I change the UserChrome.css it doesn't want to launch firefox after....I even added the line you recommended to test the hiding of the network tab and that didn't work either....any ideas?

please note that the code-snippet that i suggested has to go into userContent.css...

in regards to importing certificates, this may get very tricky. in order to simplify the process, you could use this addon https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/cck2wizard/ which allows you to create an auto-configuration including custom certificates.

The usercontent.css was not present, so I created it, however it is still not working...not picking up the setting...