My employer forces me to use Windows XP and Internet Explorer on my desktop at work. This is more than just “our internal apps are only supported on IE”, they’ve somehow locked things down. I tried to install Google Chrome, but it complains about a missing DLL when I fire it up. And Safari, which got dragged in when I installed QuickTime, can’t seem to handle our automatic proxy configuration. One of my cow orkers says he has Firefox installed, so I guess I’ll have to try that next.
This came to a head today because yesterday StackOverflow rolled out some awesome new functionality for tracking your reputation, responses to questions and comments. Yesterday it worked great, both at work with IE and at home with Safari. This morning there was a date rollover that Safari had no problems with, but going to any of the new tracking pages in IE crashes the browser. It’s completely consistent – it happens everytime in exactly the same way.
Ok the plus side, they’ve moved the bug reporting and feature requesting site from stackoverflow.uservoice.com to uservoice.stackoverflow.com, which means it isn’t blocked by the web filters at work anymore. Which means I can see that I’m not the only one having this problem.
So now it’s time to do battle with the corporate filters to see of I can get Firefox installed and working.
Here are the settings from my Firefox at work, which also requires a proxy. Set with about:config, but I copied them directly from the pref.js file.
The no_proxies_on setting lists domains and such that don’t need the proxy, but it’s a little weird.
user_pref(“network.proxy.ftp”, “proxy.example.com”);
user_pref(“network.proxy.ftp_port”, 80);
user_pref(“network.proxy.gopher”, “proxy.example.com”);
user_pref(“network.proxy.gopher_port”, 80);
user_pref(“network.proxy.http”, “proxy.example.com”);
user_pref(“network.proxy.http_port”, 80);
user_pref(“network.proxy.no_proxies_on”, “”);
user_pref(“network.proxy.share_proxy_settings”, true);
user_pref(“network.proxy.socks”, “proxy.example.com”);
user_pref(“network.proxy.socks_port”, 80);
user_pref(“network.proxy.ssl”, “proxy.example.com”);
user_pref(“network.proxy.ssl_port”, 80);
user_pref(“network.proxy.type”, 1);
All of those can be controlled via Preferences>Advanced>Network>Settings.
I installed Firefox at work about a year ago. I just copied the proxy server info from ie. I’m happy to help if you need more info.
-Alexei