Browsers

An large problems with the browsers is their disk cache. Even only some hundreds of users with netscape, mozilla, konqueror and phoenix using tens of megabytes for caching each, will often outnumber the whole user data, bring users over their quotas and cause other troubles.

Another thing that is nice to have is some default startpage and bookmarks pointing to the local organisation. Or default proxy settings.

Mozilla

Mozilla (and browsers based on this like phoenix) have a powerful configuration system. This allows making default setting and even changing them later without having to cope with the users settings.

In theory, the lines like the following in the /etc/mozilla/prefs.js should all be needed to set start-page, language, disk-cache and proxy to defaults.

pref("browser.startup.homepage", "http://www.uni-freiburg.de");
pref("intl.accept_languages", "de, en");
pref("browser.cache.disk.capacity", 0);
pref("network.proxy.http", "proxy.uni-freiburg.de");
pref("network.proxy.http_port", 8080);
pref("network.proxy.type", 1);

But while the startpage setting works in phoenix this way, it does not in mozilla (if someone understands this _overwrite bit, please tell me, how to set it there). The proxy settings will not taken, when there are some like them /usr/lib/mozilla/defaults/prefi/all.js, which sadly are in woody's mozilla (see bug #180875).

Netscape

I've not yet found something to globally place arbitrary configuration settings for this browser. (And the things made in /usr/bin/X11/netscape suggest this is not easily possible.

Of course one can place files to /etc/netscape4/defaults, but this will neither make it possible to change settings for users, that already started the browser but did not change this setting.

Possible settings for the preferences.js are:

user_pref("browser.cache.disk_cache_size", 0);
user_pref("browser.startup.homepage", "http://www.uni-freiburg.de");
user_pref("browser.startup.homepage_override", false);

Things would be easier, if netscape could be removed altogether, though it is currently the only one, that has build in java and therefore does not require the ugly Java2 licence terms to get java plugins.

konqueror

Anyone knows how to make default settings here? I've not yet investigated this one yet.