IE7/Firefox settings - changing outside of the program?

[rgratto2]

Out of curiosity, where are the settings for IE7/Firefox stored physically? Is there any easy way to change settings without going into the program itself and manually changing them from the options?

I use a VPN, and need to change the internet connection settings frequently. If I could write some sort of script to automatically change these settings it would be neat, and save me about 10 seconds of grief.

 

[rgratto2]

I investigated this issue on the firefox side a bit. I am using vista, and there is a file in the AppData directory that contains some firefox settings. For me, the path is:

C:\Users\USER\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\71bmu7oe.default

In this folder there is a pref.js file. If you look into it (of course ignoring the "Do Not Edit this File" silliness), there are lots of preferences being loaded. For the network, the following line sets up the proxy:

user_pref("network.proxy.type", 1);

2 is presumably the auto-detect option, and 3 is the default, "Direct connection to the internet". This was tricky to find, because this line is NOT included as 'user_pref("network.proxy.type", 3);' , because this is the default setting and isn't loaded specially it seems.

I intend to next look into IE's storing of these settings, and afterwards, write some little program to change these files for me with the click of the button. Although no one else probably cares

Edit: Ok, does anyone have any idea where IE7 stores its shit? I looked for a good while and came up with nothing.