Deploy Firefox on Windows

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This article is intended for IT administrators who wish to set up Firefox on the computers within their organization.

Firefox will automatically attempt to install at the system level if the account used to install Firefox has admin rights.

Firefox is installed via a setup executable that accepts the following arguments.

Considerations

  • If a user had previously installed Firefox and had insufficient privileges to install at the system level, Firefox may already be installed on the target system at the user level.
  • If a system level installation is run on a system with a user level installation already in place, and the installation paths are the same, shortcuts to the Firefox application generated at installation time may be duplicated and a duplicate uninstallation entry in the Programs and Features / Apps menus may exist.

If you believe that users may have already installed Firefox, and you’re worried about duplicate shortcuts and uninstallation entries in Windows, your environment can be remediated by:

  • asking affected users to uninstall
  • forcing an uninstall running the Firefox uninstaller on the affected systems via your configuration management tools.

Create a Distribution Point

Place the Firefox installer in a location that is available to your endpoint workstations and SCCM.

In this example, we will assume that our installer is located at the following path:

\\DP01\SWSTORE\Software\Firefox\V60\setup.exe

Prepare your installation package

Because Firefox is provided as an executable, any configuration management tool that deploys Firefox must either support executable-based installations, or must accept an installation batch script. Microsoft SCCM and certain versions of InTune support script-based installers. An example installer batch script for SCCM would look like this: "%~dp0setup.exe" -ms.

Note: because the batch script needs to reference the name of the setup executable, the script example uses the generic setup.exe as the name of the executable installer. While renaming the Firefox installer to setup.exe makes the installation script re-usable, we suggest you consider using the original binary name and changing the path in the installation script to avoid confusion if multiple versions of Firefox are stored in the same distribution point.

Deploy Package via SCCM

  1. In the SCCM Console, expand Application Management and click on the Applications applet.
  2. Choose the Script Installer type and select Manually specify the application information.
  3. Fill out the application details for the Firefox version you’re deploying.
  4. Choose the path to the distribution point you made previously that houses the installer exe and installation script
  5. For the Installation Program, select the installation script (“install.bat” in this example)
  6. Create a detection rule with the following attributes:
    • Setting Type: File System
    • Type: Folder
    • Path: C:\Program Files\
    • File or Folder Name: Mozilla Firefox
    • Check: The file system setting must exist…
    Note: If you plan on using an alternate installation path, change the detection rules to specify the alternate installation path.
  7. Configure the user experience as follows:
    • Installation behavior: Install for System
    • Logon requirement: Whether or not a user is logged on
    • Installation program visibility: Hidden
  8. Deploy the new application to a collection by right clicking on it and selecting Deploy and defining the deployment.

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These fine people helped write this article:

Joni, Lamont Gardenhire
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