Firefox

Set Microsoft Edge as Default Browser One Time

The New Microsoft Edge browser is great and everyone should use it :) Especially if you’re still on Internet Explorer, you can make Edge use IE mode for the sites you have that still require IE, without having to actually use IE.

I had a scenario where I wanted Internet Explorer users to be changed to Microsoft Edge. Previously, we’d had business requirements to set IE as the default – but now that’s no longer required, I wanted to flip their default. At the same time, I didn’t want to change Google Chrome default browser users as they’d already made that choice, and didn’t want to shove a similar Chromium browser down their throats.

As per Microsoft’s doco https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/edge-default-browser you can use an XML file with default associations, and use Group Policy to point to that XML. It doesn’t stop users from changing the associations, but it does reset the associations each time the user logs in – so not ideal if you want to set a default, but also allow flexibility.

I worked out how to do this based on current default browser and using GPO still, so here’s what I did:

As per the doco above, create an XML file that sets Microsoft Edge as the default application for certain protocols:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<DefaultAssociations> 
  <Association ApplicationName="Microsoft Edge" ProgId="MSEdgeHTM" Identifier=".html"/>
  <Association ApplicationName="Microsoft Edge" ProgId="MSEdgeHTM" Identifier=".htm"/>
  <Association ApplicationName="Microsoft Edge" ProgId="MSEdgeHTM" Identifier="http"/>
  <Association ApplicationName="Microsoft Edge" ProgId="MSEdgeHTM" Identifier="https"/>  
  <Association ApplicationName="Microsoft Edge" ProgId="MSEdgePDF" Identifier=".pdf"/>
</DefaultAssociations>

Note that .PDF is included, so if you’d rather not default .PDF files to Microsoft Edge, remove that line from the code.

The Group Policy in the doco to set this XML is called Set a default associations configuration file – and all it’s doing is populating a registry key. Instead of using the Group Policy setting, create a registry setting to apply a value to:

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\System
DefaultAssociationsConfiguration - REG_SZ - Path to XML e.g. \\dfs\share\defaultapplication.xml

The Group Policy registry setting will look like this:

We only want this registry setting to apply when the default browser is IE, and not apply any other time. We can use two options to do this – Remove this item when it is no longer applied, and Item-level targeting:

“Remove this item when it is no longer applied” will remove the registry setting when the item-level targeting condition is no longer true, which will stop the default browser applying again and again once the default browser isn’t IE.

“Item-level Targeting” is where we’ll check another registry value to see if IE is the default browser.

This is checking the registry key path Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Associations\UrlAssociations\http\UserChoice

and the Value name ProgId

and the Value Data IE.HTTP

Only when all this is true, will the XML reg key apply. Next time someone logs on, the default program associations file will be read and apply the new browser default. Then, next time Group Policy evaluates, the registry setting will be out of scope and removed, so the default program assocations file registry setting will be removed.

For reference, Chrome will be the value ChromeHTML and Edge will be MSEdgeHTM.

This method worked quite well and gave me what I was after – a one time change from Internet Explorer to Microsoft Edge, without bothering Chrome and Firefox users.

Note that this will also keep kicking in if the user changes their browser default back to Internet Explorer, which might be what you want – but if not, you’d need to add another Item-level target using a flag file or registry setting to mark that the default browser has already been applied once.

Using Firefox with a Putty SSH tunnel as a SOCKS proxy

Hi,

The reason I wanted to do this one was viewing a site from an American IP address rather than an Australian. I tested this on my Bluehost account, and it worked perfectly. Here are the instructions:

1. Work out how to connect to your server. You’ll need Putty (available at http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/) – from the Session screen, put in your hostname, most likely port 22 for SSH, make sure SSH is selected as the connection type and click ‘Open’ at the bottom of the screen. If you can log in to that, then the SSH component works and you’re good to go for the rest of this.

2. From Putty, go down to Connection > SSH > Tunnels. From this area, add in a source port (I’ve chosen 9870 but this can be any unused port), and choose ‘Dynamic’. Then click ‘Add’ and you’ll get an entry under “Forwarded Ports”:


3. Go back to Session and connect to SSH. You can save your session to load later rather than retyping the details:

putty2
4. Click “Open” and log onto your SSH session. You only need to log on with your credentials and get to a bash prompt.

5. Open Firefox, and go to the website http://whatismyip.com – take note of your external IP address, because this should change once you’re tunnelling through SSH.

6. In Firefox, press the ‘alt’ key to bring up the top menu and go into Tools > Options. Under the “Advanced” area, go to the “Network” tab and in the “Connection” area click the “Settings” button.

firefox17. Choose the “Manual proxy configuration” radio button, and under SOCKS Host enter “127.0.0.1” and the port you entered into Putty (in my case it’s 9870). Make sure SOCKS v5 is selected.

firefox2

8. Press OK twice to get back to the main view of the Firefox Browser. Try again to get to http://whatismyip.com – if all is working, you’ll see a different IP address which is from the server you’re SSH’d to. If something isn’t configured correctly, you’ll more likely see a browser error like “The proxy server is refusing connections”.

That’s it! Handy for Australians to get access to different web content and pricing.

Update: BobGrrl on twitter has mentioned another two options, free but requiring someone you know to help you at the other end. http://openvpn.net is where you can get it, so a good free opensource solution pending you’re nice enough to someone in another country!

If you want to do this with BlueHost yourself, sign up here:

There’s a bunch of other stuff you get, not just proxy access :)

Update 19/11/2013: This has been tested under Windows 8.1 and worked perfectly. If you do any of the above settings wrong (like putting in 127.0.0.1 as your HTTP proxy rather than SOCKS Host) it probably won’t work. Also make sure your forwarded port from the very first step is still there, if you close putty and re-open it may not remember those settings.