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Seeing "Your browser is being managed by your organization" on a private Ubuntu computer, tar installation.

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  • Last reply by jonzn4SUSE

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This is one of the more annoying messages Firefox has recently added:

"Your browser is being managed by your organisation."

It is obviously wrong, because it is shown on a private Ubuntu 24.04 computer where I have myself installed Firefox from a tarball installation (Firefox version 142.0.1).

The about:policies page just shows: Homepage: URL "https://start.ubuntu-mate.org/"

  Locked	false
  StartPage	"homepage"

Why does Firefox give such obviously misleading information? All the other articles are not helpful at all either, some are talking about security software, some about malware.

This is an extremely user-unfriendly and confusing message: if security software is to blame, why does Firefox not tell what exactly is restricted? When malware changed something why does Firefox not tell what it changed? What even does the message actually imply, what is prevented what otherwise would work and why? What does the information shown on the about:policies page really tell me?

This is by the way shown when starting Firefox using an EMPTY directory for its profile (so making it use a brand new profile), running from a brand new installation directory extracted from a tar file. So what on earth makes it think it is "managed by my organization"?

There is no extension installed, no policies.json file in the newly created profile, nothing. It looks as if the firefox browser would just arrive with this weird setting/configuration comiled right into it?

This is one of the more annoying messages Firefox has recently added: "Your browser is being managed by your organisation." It is obviously wrong, because it is shown on a private Ubuntu 24.04 computer where I have myself installed Firefox from a tarball installation (Firefox version 142.0.1). The about:policies page just shows: Homepage: URL "https://start.ubuntu-mate.org/" Locked false StartPage "homepage" Why does Firefox give such obviously misleading information? All the other articles are not helpful at all either, some are talking about security software, some about malware. This is an extremely user-unfriendly and confusing message: if security software is to blame, why does Firefox not tell what exactly is restricted? When malware changed something why does Firefox not tell what it changed? What even does the message actually imply, what is prevented what otherwise would work and why? What does the information shown on the about:policies page really tell me? This is by the way shown when starting Firefox using an EMPTY directory for its profile (so making it use a brand new profile), running from a brand new installation directory extracted from a tar file. So what on earth makes it think it is "managed by my organization"? There is no extension installed, no policies.json file in the newly created profile, nothing. It looks as if the firefox browser would just arrive with this weird setting/configuration comiled right into it?

Modified by johann.petrak

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Post a screenshot of the help and about from your distro Firefox and from mozilla tarball. see screenshots I have my distro version and all other version run from tarballs in my downloads folder. Try downloading Firefox from Mozilla, run firefox-bin from the folder, and see if you have the same issue. No install process, just run it. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/#product-desktop-release

policy-templates https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates/

I do see a policy template for Homepage.

Modified by jonzn4SUSE

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