Capital Design

I really like Firefox but still find many web sites that just work better in Internet Explorer.  IE Tab is a great extension that allows you to use the Internet Explorer rendering engine within a Firefox tab.  One of it's most useful features is the ability to create rules that define when IE Tab should be used automagically.  These rules evaluate the requested web address and can be simple string matches or can be more complex regular expression pattern matches.

Here is a screen shot of the interface for configuring the web addresses that will be rendered using Internet Explorer.

The * in some of the addresses specifies a wild card and is a very simple way to define a pattern.  More powerful patterns can be defined using regular expressions.  An example of a regular expression pattern in the above screen shot is, "/^https?:\/\/[A-Z,a-z,0-9,\/]*$/", this pattern will match all intranet web addresses and render them using IE.  If you work for a company that uses Active Directory and has a sizable intranet IE is often an easier browser to use because it will not force you to login for every different intranet web server that resources are requested from (it will automagically pass your Windows credentials).

Explanation of intranet regular expression site filter:

• The // surrounding the pattern let IE Tab know that the rule is a regular expression.
• "^" calls out the beginning of the web address
• "http" must be the beginning of the web address
• "s?" means that "s" is an optional character in the web address following the "http". ? is states that the character immediately preceding is optional and may or may not exist
• ":\/\/" means that "://" must come after the http(s) portion of the pattern.  The backslashes are used because the forward slashes have to be escaped as they are special characters in the Regular Expression syntax
• "[A-Z,a-z,0-9,\/]" means that any character that falls in the ranges defined within the brackets is a valid pattern match.  In this case we are restricting valid characters to alphanumeric values and forward slash
• "*" states that the previous pattern can be matched for many characters.  Without the star following the "[A-Z,a-z,0-9,\/]" the pattern would only match a single character following the "://"
• Finally the $ calls out the expected end of the web address

**UPDATE**
Came up with a better version that works for more cases.  This one will work for any address that doesn't include a top level domain before the first slash or question mark.

/^https?:\/\/[^\.\/\?\n]*((\?|\/).*)?$/