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

Two Possible Suggestions

[digitalvengeance]

As a developer who has been forced to use IE in applications in the past, I can say that the Microsoft "Web Browser Control" is basically the IE rendering engine encapsulated in an OCX. Its extremely simple to include this rendering engine in any windows application. I'd imagine it would be trivial to write a firefox extension* that parses the URL and loads an IE control in a new "empty" frame if the URL is on the white list, then passes the URL to the control to be handled.

We might be able to use one of the tabs modification extensions that already exists as a starting point for usurping default firefox tab behavior, and I'd be interested in helping with a project of this nature.

*I have no experience writing firefox plugins, but the variety that are available show that the architecture is fairly extensible.

A much simpler, but much less integrated approach would be to use a "URL Launcher." Basically, a program that determines if the domain from the URL entered is "IE-only" or not and fires the appropriate browser accordingly. This would be a 5-10 minute project for a good developer, but would be effective.

Josh.

Re:Sounds like a job for the new Netscape..

[booch]

Exactly. You can set the default renderer to be Mozilla's Gecko, and then have settings for individual pages, telling it to use the IE renderer. You can also define other settings for specifically listed sites, just like in Firefox.

Re:Why not?

[malcomvetter]

Thanks. The goal here is not to create the end-all solution, but to work in the current environment while things are imperfect. I agree that ideally we would just choose one browser and change the web apps that require something else, but in the interest of migrating to that point, I think an interim solution is needed to: + hijack any all all URLs + compare to whitelist + open in an appropriate browser + be scalable and deployable ... not just for my laziness as some would suggest, but for a slew of end-users who haven't a clue ... it just works. Now I heard of an old project where a company wanted to rewrite URLs, so they hijacked them at the http level. Anyone familiar with this?