Making Firefox into a "Single-Site Browser"

Mention of a "Single-Site Browser" is here.

m00nbl00d described how it's possible with Chrome or Chromium using the command line.

Here's a way to do that with an existing installation of Firefox. I've used the SimpleBlock add-on for the purpose.

It requires creating a text file called SimpleBlock.ini in the user's profile folder. The file will contain a regular expression such as this:

Code:

R: https?://(?!(My.bank.com|Second.site.com|Third.site.com))

The presence of Second.site.com and Third.site.com (or more) depends on whether other sites are needed for the main site, My.bank.com, to function. If they aren't, the line would simply be:

Code:

R: https?://(?!(My.bank.com))

Depending on the user, a separate profile with SimpleBlock installed can be made for the purpose. Or, the same profile (with SimpleBlock installed) can be used and SimpleBlock disabled when not required.

This method works for me with Firefox 11 (beta).

 

Nice to see it's possible to achieve it with Firefox.

I'm wondering if IE and Opera have something for them? IE would be a bit painful, though, as it doesn't allow profiles... unless one uses different user accounts.

 

Apparently, you can also use NoScript ABE function. But, it can only be done by web masters?

-http://noscript.net/abe/web-authors.html

Internet Explorer 9 has Pinned Sites, by the way. I don't use IE9, so I didn't remember about it. I couldn't find anything about Opera, so far.

-edit-

Interesting. Mozilla had a dedicated site-specific browser. -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Prism I suppose there wasn't much demand for it...

It's still available for download -http://prism.mozillalabs.com/ It's also available as an extension. -https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mozilla-labs-prism/

Maybe they will still work with recent Firefox versions?

 

I don't know much about Opera and whether profiles are possible there. If the urlfilter.ini (?) allows for the type of regex used, it maybe possible?

Frankly, I looked into this because of my interest in regex and because I already use something similar to exclude a couple of sites, askubuntu.com and youtube.com, from a general style sheet that I set up, thanks to banthaz and srazzano over at forum.userstyles.org.