One day you may find the message “Your browser is being managed by your organization” when opening the Firefox settings page. It may have a bit different text like “Your organization has disabled the ability to change some settings”. This means one of two things is happening: either you yourself changed the browser configuration on the flag page, or the administrator of your computer changed the browser settings.
The last case it is perfectly fine. But what to do if you are the only administrator and remember well that you did not make any changes to the hidden browser settings?
So you know that you or any other user did not change settings. But it can be your third-party antivirus like Avast and AVG. And extensions can also make changes to Firefox control policies. This is nothing to worry about unless it blocks your mission-critical settings. As an administrator you have full privileges to remove obstacles created by third-party software.
To remove the “Your browser is being managed by your organization”, you need to figure out the names of the applied policies, check their presence in about:config, the registry, in a policy file, and check your installed extensions. If a policy is present in any of the places, you need to disable its.
Find applied policies in Firefox
To see the names of the changed policies, either click on the message “Your browser is being managed by your organization”.
Alternatively, type about:policies in the URL box.
From the picture below, you can see that Firefox has the BackgroundAppUpdates policy configured; it is set to false.
Disable applied policies in about:config
- Type about:config in URL box
- In the “Find” textbox, type the name of the policies you have found.
- If you see them applied, reset them. This will instantly remove the “Your browser is being managed by your organization” banner.
But if you still see the banner, or the policies aren’t listed in about:config, it is time to check the registry.
Check the Windows Registry
- Press ⊞ Win +R and type regedit.
- Navigate to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Mozilla\Firefox.
- If the key is present, make a backup copy of the key.
- Now check the values on the right. If you have the policy values, in our case it is BackgroundAppUpdates, remove them.
- Restart the browser.
Now, see if the notice about managing the browser by your organization’s on the settings page has disappeared. If so, the message “Corporate Policy Service is inactive” will appear on the about:policies page.
Deleting a policy file
Firefox policy settings can be stored in a special policy.json file located in the folder:
%ProgramFiles%\Mozilla Firefox\Distribution
The file and folder are created when someone is changing Firefox settings through the Group Policy Editor. The file can also be created manually by the system administrator. If you have such a folder and file, move the latter somewhere else and restart the Firefox browser.
Check the Firefox extensions
If the methods described above did not solve the problem, try starting the browser in safe mode while holding down the ⇧ Shift key.
If the problem disappears in Safe Mode, then one of the third-party extensions is the culprit. Find it by disabling extensions one by one, until you find the one which adds the message. You may want to disable it completely.
