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mozilla
policy-templates
Python2018–2026
mozilla / policy-templates

policy-templates

Policy Templates for Firefox

Web Development
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
32Distinct people
32Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
1.3KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Policy Templates for Firefox

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

They very well could do this for a company that requires really strict privacy and security, but unfortunately in its current state Firefox doesn't have nearly the corporate…

4oo4 used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year32 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-06-21 03:24:05 UTC to 2026-10-13 18:49:05 UTC.

024682018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 1 submissions, 7 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC817
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Firefox Policy Templates NoteThese policies are in active development and may contain changes that do not work with current versions of Firefox. Use the officially released versions if you are deploying changes. This repository contains policy templates to support deploying and managing Firefox as an enterprise browser. Firefox policies allow administrators to centrally manage browser behavior, enforce security requirements, configure features, or disable certain functionality. Policies are commonly used in enterprise or managed environments such as businesses, schools, and public-sector organizations. Policy documentation WarningDocumentation for policy behavior and syntax is moving to Firefox Admin Docs. The new docs repository is public and open to contributions, so if you want to make improvements, feel free to contribute at https://github.com/mozilla/enterprise-admin-reference. See the GitHub Discussion for more information.
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

32 sources
horsawlarway·Jul 5, 2023
There is no such thing as a "known trusted extension" ever since they killed sideloading extensions and forced auto-updates. 10 years ago not force updating extensions was also a thing they moved behind a flag, and then just dropped. Also - if you want to blacklist certain extensions from certain sites, you abso-freaking-lutely can already... see: https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/master/READ... you want the `restricted_domains` field. It gets worse - Mozilla is the fucking worst at checking submitted extensions. They tried to the play into the whole "app store" thing that Google/Apple were doing, but those are justifiable cost centers at those two companies in a way that just doesn't work for a player like Mozilla. Mozilla's store checks for extensions are fairly pathetic. You can submit a near empty shell with excessiv
Read the rest
e permissions, get approved the first time, then auto-update to a new release (which will deploy to users immediately thanks to auto-updates). That new version has to pass a battery of useless automatic SAST checks, which will happily highlight all sorts of things it doesn't like (it flags words like "hello" because it contains a curse word) but which won't do shit to check if you're hoovering up credentials, browsing data, tracking users, etc. If you're unlucky, at some point in the next 24 months you'll trigger a real review from Mozilla and get caught. To be blunt - I have 15 years experience writing extensions. I don't like Google. If you think Mozilla is better you're wrong.
In Firefox 115 can remotely disable any extension on any site
4oo4·May 11, 2023Recommendation phrase
They very well could do this for a company that requires really strict privacy and security, but unfortunately in its current state Firefox doesn't have nearly the corporate sysadmin-friendly tooling that Chrome and especially Edge do. When I was tasked with implementing CIS browser hardening policies at a previous job a few years ago, this was just a matter of enabling some Group Policy template settings for Chrome and Edge, but for Firefox this involved distributing a prefs.js file to all the workstations. In any corporate environment it's very likely going to be point and click Windows admins that are implementing browser standards, who tend to be allergic to anything resembling code and are already used to using GPOs for just about everything. Yes, Firefox does have GPO templates but it's not nearly as rich as Chrome and Edge. Edge ha
Read the rest
s even more GPO templates than does Chrome iirc, Chrome already had a lot to begin with and then Microsoft added even more of their own on top of that. https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/v4.11/READM... https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/configure-micro... That alone already puts Firefox at a huge disadvantage for corporate deployment, the other thing that makes it even less attractive, even to companies where privacy/security is a huge requirement (like my previous job) is that Edge is already bundled with the OS, and is one less thing that needs to be manually patched. In high security corporate environments, just keeping things patched is always a huge task so it's very hard to convince someone that they need to put in more work to keep an extra piece of software patched (which is already very difficult considering how frequently browsers are updated). To make things even worse, just about all vendors will only support Chromium-based browsers for whatever SaaS they sell you, so Firefox is a nonstarter for getting support, even if it will work just fine 99.9% of the time. For all these reasons, I lost the battle to keep Firefox around, which is a huge shame because of how much I love it and wanted to fight the Chromium monoculture. So I guess for a corporation to support Firefox despite how much more corporate-friendly the alternatives are, they'd have to reaaaally want to.
In We Must Fight for Firefox
todoslostacos·Nov 4, 2021
(Disclaimer: I work on the Firefox Application Update system) > But let me opt out It seems to me that you can opt out. You can use the "Check for updates but let you choose to install them" setting in `about:preferences`. Or you can use the exact policy currently under discussion: `DisableAppUpdate`. Or there is another policy called `ManualAppUpdateOnly` [0]. > (Mozilla, are you listening?) Why yes, we are listening. We have heard many people request the ability to disable automatic updates, which is why we have the options that I mentioned above. If you feel that these options don't meet your needs, we would really appreciate you filing a bug [1]. We will get to it fastest if you put it in the correct component (which for this issue is `Toolkit::Application Update`). > for the love of god please don't override my preferences back to au
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tomatic updates when you decide to change the UI of preferences. I'm guessing that you are referring to when we removed the "Never install updates" setting [2]? This wasn't fundamentally a UI change. We had several good reasons to remove the underlying pref. Naturally, that meant that the UI for that pref went away as well. I won't spend a lot of time getting into our reasoning here, but we would be happy to discuss it with you if you want to chat with us about it. You can find us in the `#install-update:mozilla.org` channel on https://chat.mozilla.org [0] https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/#manualappupdate... [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/home [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1420514
In LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom
mfo4321·Sep 28, 2021
You can create a policies.json file with these contents: { "policies": { "DisableAppUpdate": true } } Place it in the platform specific place: "On Windows, create a directory called distribution where the EXE is located and place the file there. On Mac, the file goes into Firefox.app/Contents/Resources/distribution. On Linux, the file goes into firefox/distribution, where firefox is the installation directory for firefox, which varies by distribution or you can specify system-wide policy by placing the file in /etc/firefox/policies." from https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/master/READ... EDIT: alternatively, you can install the ESR version for 91, use the userchrome link in the sibling comment, and forget about it for 18 months, wich is what I'm currently doing. And good thing too, apparently 92 broke some
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UI again, because of course it did.
In Google sets burial date for legacy Chrome Extensions, fears for ad-blockers grow

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