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White List URL Browser Selector?

Posted by Cliff on from the not-such-a-bad-idea dept.

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?"

2 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. if only .... by DrSkwid · · Score: 1, Offtopic


    people had chosen plan9

    Realising that mime types were *not* the answer esp. based on the file extension, the plumber does exactly what you ask but for *all* applications

    It regex matches the text sent to it and acts accordingly.

    I do almost what you ask but for the internal browser "mothra" and to firefox via ssh.

    Mothra is getting old and can't even handle frames and tables so it is necessary to have a 4.x browser available for web access.

    --
    There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
  2. Doable but not worth doing. by fm6 · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    Obviously there are many ways you can do this. The simplest I can think of is a Firefox extension similar to "Open in IE" that works automaticaly when it sees you navigating to a page on a list. Which saves you a little hassle, but is still pretty messy. Probably what you'd want is some kind of framework application that embeds Gecko, MSHTML, and maybe a couple of others, and switches between them as preprogrammed.

    Thing is, these applications all require work. The plugin is maybe a week of somebody's time, and the framework is a major project. Who's going to invest their time in such a thing? Not Firefox enthusiasts, who donate their labor because they love the software, not because they want to make life easier for people who can't ditch Internet Explorer.

    Probably you could get somebody to do it if you paid them. But if you have that kind of money lying around, you should spend it on making your company's servers less dependent on proprietary tech.

    Just because something doable and useful, doesn't mean it's worth the trouble.