Writing software, the wrong way

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Getting this done, one policy at a time

So while the bug has been posted, I wanted to go into more details about the policies that have been implemented so far. The complete list is on a google spreadsheet, but I will outline some of them :

Apologies to the smaller images. You can click most of them for full resolution.

  • Enforce Full Screen : Some people have been asking for this, for a kiosk setting. This looks identical to IE7 (it's not full-screen by default). The navigation toolbar, bookmarks toolbar, and menu are all gone along with the status bar.

  • Disable changing the home page : As you'd expect.

  • Disable closing the browser and Explorer windows : This is pretty funny, neither File->close nor alt-f4 work. Interestingly, IE7 throws an alert box if you try closing it from the task manager, but your prompted a few seconds later with a dialog box telling you that the application isn't responding and whether you want to force quit. The force quit works. Firefox3 does almost the same thing, but doesn't throw an alert box.

  • Disable Context Menu : Disables right-click context menu on web pages

  • Hide Favorites menu : I don't know why you would want to do this, but it's a policy.

  • Turn off displaying the Internet Explorer Help Menu : Really folks, wtf?

  • Turn off tabbed browsing : This makes some people sad. If you set the policy after creating tabs and saving the session, the tabs still appear. So still some bugs :)

  • Proxy Settings : Yay, my part. I guarantee it works or your money back! Here I am connected to a Japanese proxy server and went to google.com


The achilles' heel in my entire project right now is about:config and chrome://. But we can settle that eventually. Right now, the project needs a lot of code polish and tests.

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