brain-dump/sysadmin/macos/mdm-profiles

Chrome & Firefox MDM Profiles

Automate management of the Google Chrome & Mozilla Firefox browser with MDM profiles.

My sample mobileconfigs should work in both Filewave or JAMF; edit to suit.

Benefits Of MacOS Profiles for Google Chrome & Mozilla Firefox Browsers

GPO-like management for Macs:

• Force install browser extensions like uBlock Origin
• Block installation of unapproved browser extensions (prevent drive-by malware addons users manage to find)
• Force auto-updates and browser restart prompts to apply updates
• Prevent users from signing in on personal Google accounts (during testing, it was discovered users could sign into their personal gmail and install unapproved extensions on a managed browser!)

Example Profile

• Chrome-Preferences.mobileconfig - Forced updates via the com.google.Keystone namespace is at the bottom, too. I deploy these two "profiles" as a single profile, you may or may not be able to do the same with your MDM software. Edit to suit.

Setting Explanations

• Google Knowledgebase

• Policy Reference - Search values, or find policies to fit your organization

• Firefox-Preferences.mobileconfig

• Policy Reference - Search values, or find policies to fit your organization

Test Your Policies

To see whether or not your policies are being applied, (after deployment) on a target machine, go to the following in the Chrome address bar:

chrome://policy

or Firefox address bar:

about:policies

:warning: Chrome profile bugs: you have any typo in your profile deployment (such as a string where an integer is expected), it will throw silent errors & that rule won't be processed; you'll only notice by going to chrome://policy on a target machine and checking for errors.