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Security Zone Settings with Portable Firefox

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n8
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Security Zone Settings with Portable Firefox

Good afternoon,
I am using Firefox 3.6 Portable. It appears that it is not honoring my Internet Zone settings in the Restricted Sites zone. My understanding is that Firefox 3.0 and above leverage the OS settings.

Can someone shed some light into this matter? Is the portable version different in some way with respect to this issue?

Thank you,
n8

John T. Haller
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Don't Think So

I think the Internet Zone settings are IE-only settings. Only internet explorer and apps that simply instantiate IE respect them.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

n8
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Hmm...

I was basing my information off of...

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Unable_to_save_or_download_files#Bypass_Window...

I interpreted the above mentioned information as Firefox honoring zones.

What do you think based on the link?

Jimbo
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The article refers to a very specific flag

When you download a file using IE or Firefox 3+, and save it to an NTFS partition, a flag is set on the file to show that it is from a remote computer. That is why you get the "are you sure you want to run this file" dialog, even if you launch the download from windows explorer.

The article is saying that if the "Launching Applications and Unsafe Files" flag for the internet zone is set to Disable, rather than to Prompt, then Firefox will actually not download the files at all, but this is the only part of the zone configurations that it look as, as far as I can see.

Is it specifically this issue that you are seeing, or are you seeing some other aspect of the internet zone settings not being honoured?

Also, it doesn't use any rules to set which sites what zones apply to - this is a single flag, across the board setting for FF.

n8
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Thank you for the

Thank you for the clarification. It is unfortunate that it only implements Zones in the manner you described instead of fully embracing their function.

To be specific, all I'm trying to do is block some sites. I had some site setup with wild-cards in IE's "Restricted Sites" zone (eg *.tribalfusion.com) and I just wanted Portable Firefox to block them in the same way.

Does Firefox have this functionality built in native somewhere. I'm new to Firefox so I'm a bit unfamiliar with it.

Regards,
-n8

John T. Haller
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Network

The proper way to block anything like this is at the network level, not at the client level.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

n8
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An an ideal world, I agree

An an ideal world, I agree that perimeter/proxy security would be the way to go. But I'm dealing with a stand alone system on a DSL line in a remote office at a construction site. I'm not attempting to harden the install by any measure. I just want to block a few things for convince sake and unintentional incidents.

Any thoughts?

Thank you for the help.

John T. Haller
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Router

Even a standard $30 consumer router (which they probably have in the loop) has the ability to block specific sites like online games and such.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

n8
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I suppose you're right. But

I suppose you're right. But for me, this has ( more or less ) turned into a question of curiosity than anything else. There are many ways to skin a cat. I'm just wondering what Firefox natively has that would be equivalent to Zones in IE. Maybe this is the wrong forum to ask these questions. If so let me know & I’ll go somewhere else.

Jimbo
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You could do it with an addon

Off the top of my head, I don't know of any addons specifically designed for this task, though the probably exist, but you could definitely do it with something like FoxyProxy, which allows you to create multiple proxy settings, with URL based filters for which to use, so you could create a dummy one that would fail to load the pages, and configure it to be active for the sites you wanted to block.

J Neutron
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Foxfilter

Less than a minute with Google looking for "firefox parent settings" gets lots of hits including the FoxFilter add-on for Firefox.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4351

FoxFilter helps block content for essentially any user-defined Web site or criteria. You can quickly and easily block content for an entire site (e.g. Playboy) or enter custom keyword filters (e.g. videos, movies, images, pornography, nudity, gambling, explosives, etc.) that will be used to help block content for any site that contains these keywords. There are many pornography-related keywords already included! (see Filter Keywords below for more info).

There are lots more links available ("about 818,000" according to Google). I'll let you try it yourself and you can see what works best for you.

neutron1132 (at) usa (dot) com

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