White List URL Browser Selector?

malcomvetter asks: "OK, so I'm stuck working in a Microsoft environment. My preference is Firefox for the external 'untrusted' web content out there and our internal 'trusted' web apps require IE, but rather than pick one browser over the other as 'default' I came up with this idea: I want a tool that gets installed as my default browser in Windows, and all URL strings that Windows passes to it can then be simply regex'ed for domain and then routed (re-passed) appropriately. Hence, having the ability to allow admins to maintain a white-list of 'trusted' IE sites (or [insert browser here] sites) and those URLs are passed to IE, all others defaulting to (in my preference) Firefox. And when I thought about it, I was surprised that I hadn't heard of an existing tool to do that. I have used the Firfox extension for 'open in IE', but I'd like a tool that I can configure and forget about. Has anyone seen such an app? Would it be an extremely hard thing to build?"

Comments

Sounds like a job for the new Netscape..

[phaze3000]

Take a look at this article from a couple of days ago on the new Netscape. It can use either Gecko or IE rendering on a per-site basis.

It's still in beta at the moment, but I expect a final version to be out in the not too distant future.

Why not?

[CokeJunky]

I am seeing alot of people saying that nothing exists and why don't you use browser/tool/etc X, instead of offering useful advice.

No, this tool would not be too hard to write. I have written a protocol handler for windows (years ago). All it takes is a registry entry to point windows to the program, and a program that processes it's command line arguments through a list of greps with actions (hard coded or stored in a config file if you like). The only difficult part is that once in the browser, you can't easily intercept the selected links and check every one.

I think a rudimentry attempt at such a program could be done in 30-40 lines of C code, or with a perl script closer to 10 lines or less. All you have to do is find out what the registry entry for the protocol handler is, and change it. I found it by digging through the registry with regedit, but I suspect that the MSDN knowlege base probably has an article on it.

There is no need to browbeat someone over such a request because it doesn't make sense to us. The true measure of a utility such as that is that someone wants to use it, and someone (probably the same person) is willing to write it -- if it doesn't already exist.

This is what we call the pragmatic approach, eh?