How to change your Firefox 8 default page.

Open Source applications and tinkering with it when you know how to modify it can do a lot of wonders for you and your company/ organization.

Let me cite one example.

I wanted to provide a subtle but implicit recall of our corporate values and identity to each of our team in the office. Since we do much work in our PC's (desktop and laptops), i thought of an ingenious way to remind them everyday of our primal existence.

So what i did was to do some configuration tweak of the Mozilla Firefox and integrate to make default our webpage at the initialization of each of their browsers.

There are actually two ways that i would like to share with you on how you can do it for your organization, if you think this is something useful.

1. Changing the default page with the use of the about:config feature/setting

In my case, i was using these components:
KahelOS
Firefox 8.0.1
to set www.8layertech.com, to be the default page.

Steps:
1.Open your firefox browser
2.type about:config at the address bar.
Then it will prompt you with this screen.
Just click "i'll be carefull, I promise" button.

3.Then search on the filter bar "browser.startup.homepage"
4.Change the value to your desired "default" page (eg www.8layertech.com)
5. Restart firefox and you will see that the default page is now set to yur desired page.

Simple as that!
More of about:config check this site http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config

2. Changing the default page for more users than just one desktop.

In our case, since i wanted to change the default page for all users, the steps below may well serve this purpose.

1. Using your favorite editor (such as gedit or vi), copy this;
[XRE]
EnableProfileMigrator=false

and then save it as override.ini to create this file

2.Next, copy this content:
pref("general.config.obscure_value", 0);
pref("general.config.filename", "mozilla.cfg");

save this file as local-settings.js

3.Then, copy this file content:
//Firefox 8 Default Settings
pref("browser.startup.homepage", "http://www.8layertech.com");

and then save it as mozilla.cfg

4. locate /usr/lib/firefox/ either at your file explorer or at your console and then copy the mozilla.cfg and override.ini that you just created.

5.then locate /usr/lib/firefox/defaults/pref/ either at your file explorer or at your console and copy local-settings.js that you also created.

6.finally, start up your Firefox browser and see what happens.