Manage Mozilla Firefox bookmarks with Microsoft Intune

This is a follow-up story on the first blog post about managing Mozilla Firefox with Microsoft Intune. In the comments, we discussed how the bookmarks could be managed. It seems managing bookmarks isn`t as easy as compared to how it is done with Group Policies and how other Firefox policies are managed with Intune.
I did some testing myself and I also opened an issue a few months ago on GitHub. I found out the bookmarks could only be successfully managed if we use all the options of a bookmark. In this blog post, I show what I exactly mean by that and how we can configure Firefox bookmarks with Intune.

Collect required policy settings

The required information for the Bookmarks policy setting is found in the Firefox ADMX file. If we open the file and browse to the Bookmarks section, we see a list of Bookmarks (Bookmark01 – Bookmark50).
To configure the first bookmark we use Bookmark01, for the second Bookmarks02 and so on.

We see in the ADMX file, the Bookmarks01 policy contains 5 elements (options):
BookmarkTitle
BookmarkURL
BookmarkFolder
BookmarkFavicon
BookmarkPlacement

Where we could leave an element not configured (blank/ empty) when using Group Policies, this is not the case using Intune. At least not with ADMX file 2.1 (and older) with which I did my testing. It took some time to figure this out, but it it works now 🙂

Create a Custom configuration profile

Let`s have a look at how we manage the bookmark setting using a Custom configuration profile with Intune.

• Sign-in to the Endpoint Manager admin center
• Browse to Devices – Windows
• Browse to Configuration profiles
• Click +Create profile

• Choose Windows 10 and later as Platform
• Choose Custom as Profile
• Click Create

• Give the profile a Name
• Enter a Description (Optional)
• Click Next

The first step to ingest the ADMX file is only necessary when this is the first setting you deploy using Intune, otherwise, you can add the rows to your existing custom profile with which you already manage Firefox settings.

• Click Add on the Configuration settings tab
• Give the Row a Name
• Fill in the OMA-URI: ./Device/Vendor/MSFT/Policy/ConfigOperations/ADMXInstall/Firefox/Policy/FirefoxAdmx
• Data type: String
• Value: As value copy the entire content of the ADMX file in the value field

You can fill in the required information for every element, besides for the BookmarkPlacement element. For this element, you need to make a choice between toolbar or menu.

• On the settings tab click Add
• Give the Row a Name
• Fill in the OMA-URI:
  ./Device/Vendor/MSFT/Policy/Config/Firefox~Policy~firefox~Bookmarks/Bookmark01
• Data type: String
• Value:

<enabled/>
<data id="BookmarkTitle" value="In The Cloud 247"/>
<data id="BookmarkURL" value="https://www.inthecloud247.com"/>
<data id="BookmarkPlacement" value="toolbar"/>
<data id="BookmarkFavicon" value="https://example.com/favicon.ico"/>
<data id="BookmarkFolder" value="Important websites"/>

• On the settings tab click Add
• Give the Row a Name
• Fill in the OMA-URI:
  ./Device/Vendor/MSFT/Policy/Config/Firefox~Policy~firefox~Bookmarks/Bookmark02
• Data type: String
• Value:

<enabled/>
<data id="BookmarkTitle" value="LinkedIn"/>
<data id="BookmarkURL" value="https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterklapwijk/"/>
<data id="BookmarkPlacement" value="menu"/>
<data id="BookmarkFolder" value="SocialMedia"/>
<data id="BookmarkFavicon" value="https://example.com/favicon.ico"/>

These are just two example, you can manage 50 with the custom profile if you follow above examples.

End-user experience

Let`s have a look at the end-user experience.

As soon as the policy is synced to the Windows 10 device we see the managed bookmarks in Firefox.
As you can see I deployed several URLs to several sub folders on the toolbar and in the menu.

If we enter about:policies in the address bar we get an overview of the active policies including the bookmarks.

That`s it for this blog post. If you have any questions, please let me know.