I want every workstation in my school to have Ecosia as their default search engine.
If one wants to change his search engine to Ecosia on his home computer with Firefox he needs to add the extension to his Firefox profile and change his default search engine to the then added option "Ecosia"
But it is hard to do this for every user in our Windows domain automatically.
My easiest option would be to deploy a script to modify the Firefox(Chrome/Edge) installation but didn't find a way to change the configured search engine. Adding the extension seems to be no problem.
Also I can not change anything in the user files as they are not saved locally but on the domain controller. (Otherwise I could just overwrite the users Firefox profiles)
Some of the other options to deploy custom Firefox installers in companies included preinstalled extensions but I haven't found a configuration that included the search engine configuration.
I want to change the search preferences in Firefox, Chrome and Edge. Firefox alone is driving me crazy.
But there must be a way to achieve this as many viruses doing search hijacking change your search engine without problems event though i was not able to find any source code of those.
So in the end the question is:
Is there a way to add an extension and change the search engine of Firefox/Chrome/Edge without touching the user data or is there a way to preconfigure installers to include a different standard search engine?
I'm kinda desperate by now, so any approach is welcome.
To be specific:
My school has about 200 computers with Windows7/Windows10
combined in a windows domain. Each Student has his own account.
The system for distributing software installers/scripts is opsi
If you use Firefox ESR, you can set up search engines via GPO.
You can add a search engine as part of your web extension via chrome_settings_overrides.search_engine in the extension's manifest (example); making it the default will prompt the user.
The way "viruses [are] doing search hijacking change" is probably by storing the search plugin file to searchplugins and updating the user preferences file.