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I would like to have our intranet site accessed through Firefox or Chrome, rather than IE. However we don't want users having access to any other internet sites apart from our intranet, unless they are using IE.

I notice that Chrome has what they called 'Hosted Apps' and there is a Firefox spinoff called Prism. Does anyone know whether either of these are suitable?

Can you install a Chrome hosted app without giving the user access to other sites through Google Chrome? What about Prism? Are these products stable?

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  • Even if you achieve what you're after, how do you intend to stop the same user from accessing the Internet with a different browser? You're really tackling this from the wrong angle. Feb 21, 2011 at 9:04
  • Firstly, I can give you the email address of my sys admin if you want to discuss it with him. I just work here. The reasoning is however, that we are using Citrix Access Gateway which is heavily optimised for IE. Second, I think you misunderstand the scenario: The user will have IE installed - they can access the internet through IE. They won't have any other full browsers installed. They should have a 'site-specific-browser' which only has access to one site (our Intranet).
    – cbp
    Feb 22, 2011 at 6:40

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First, that's really weird choice: using worst browser in environment you can't control (sending users with IE to wild internet).

Second, you can block access by using User Agent. Notice that spoofing user agent is pretty easy, there is built-in features and plugins for Chrome, Opera and Firefox.

For restricting access by User Agent, you need some proxy software. For example Squid (transparent or not transparent) proxy can handle that. If you are not familiar with Squid, you can browse homepage and for example this example configuration.

Prism

In the beginning of February Mozilla announced that Prism is no longer maintained, and new project will be Chromeless. Chromeless is under heavy development, and not ready for production.

Hosted Apps

You can block other sites by local configuration (it's easy to circumvent) or proxy (Squid or similar).

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  • Thanks blocking by user agent seems like a good strategy in our scenario. The reason we are using IE is because we are using Citrix Access Gateway to provide a virtual desktop. CAG is heavily optimised for IE. So the point as I understand is to stop users from draining our servers on non-optimised browsers. Also I am told that IE has far more settings that can be configured through group policy.
    – cbp
    Feb 22, 2011 at 6:44

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