Problem:
Portability operation is slow due to large Portability file for Firefox.
Symptoms:
ProfileUnity runs a long time at logon and logoff. Logs indicate that Portability runs for a long time to complete, and restoring/saving files for Firefox takes up the majority of the time. The Portability file for Firefox is very large in size.
Possible Resolution(s):
Normally ProfileUnity uses exclusion rules to exclude any files and folders that are not essential to retaining the application or the user settings. However, Firefox randomizes the user's profile directory name, forces Portability to capture the whole profile directory and prevents excluding certain unessential subdirectories and files. To work around this issue, we need to enable Firefox's sanitize feature to clean up the user profile when it closes, reducing the size of the user profile and improve the Portability operation time. This can be done by adding a few registry values.
For Firefox version 60 to 67, the only option available is to sanitize the whole user profile when the app closes:
| Registry Hive | HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE or HKEY_CURRENT_USER |
| Registry Path | Software\Policies\Mozilla\Firefox |
| Value Name | SanitizeOnShutdown |
| Value Type | REG_DWORD |
| Enabled Value | 1 |
| Disabled Value | 0 |
This will clean up the Firefox profile size but it is quite aggressive. Things like cookies and history get removed as well.
Fortunately since Firefox version 68, it supports additional options to only clear up selective portions, and we recommend these two settings:
| Registry Hive | HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE or HKEY_CURRENT_USER |
| Registry Path | Software\Policies\Mozilla\Firefox\SanitizeOnShutdown |
| Value Name | Cache |
| Value Type | REG_DWORD |
| Enabled Value | 1 |
| Disabled Value | 0 |
| Registry Hive | HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE or HKEY_CURRENT_USER |
| Registry Path | Software\Policies\Mozilla\Firefox\SanitizeOnShutdown |
| Value Name | OfflineApps |
| Value Type | REG_DWORD |
| Enabled Value | 1 |
| Disabled Value | 0 |
You may use ProfileUnity or the GPO to add these registry values to HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive. You may also set these values in the master image or on the machines, but if you do, add them in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE hive instead.
Reference: Mozilla Firefox Administrative Templates (https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates)
Product: ProfileUnity
Product Version: 6.7.x and newer