If I'm moving my department from IE to Firefox, am I going to run into any particular security challenges? Do you have any tips for reconfiguring firewalls for Firefox?
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On security, there are fewer security issues than for plain IE. If the Firefox user increases security via the Options dialog box, then the firewall might need extra features to accomodate that, like certificate revocation lists, or proxy scripts. In general there's nothing to do, though.
You just need to study the Firefox proxy options to see the four ways forward. If you do everything at the firewall and have useful default routes in place, then there's nothing to do for Firefox: just set it up for "direct connect to the Internet."
The user can't easily throw away security in Firefox. There's no "let bad things happen to me" checkbox available. They have to work harder than that to cause trouble.
This was first published in December 2004