Andy’s Techie Blog » Blog Archive » Sonicwall Firewalls and Internet Explorer 7

Sonicwall Firewalls and Internet Explorer 7

Posted on October 31st, 2006 AndyParkes 5 comments

In my post about the full release of Internet Explorer 7i said that i was only using it on the laptop as i was worried about not being able to use it with the Sonicwall firewalls we use.

I decided to do a little bit more investigation into this a felt like i’ve been missing out!

A quick look on the microsoft IE newsgroup indicates that the firewall runs a script called BrowserCheck.js when it opens the pop-up window.

Basically this means that the firewall is expecting Internet Explorer 6 so just does nothing when it encounters version 7.

This gives me two options

1) Wait for Sonicwall to upgrade the firmware to support IE7

2) Make the sonicwall think i’m using IE6

I’m going to take the second option i think

Microsoft provide the “User Agent String Utility” on their download site for this

When you run the utility it gives you the option to report the site to Microsoft so “they can help improve” Internet Explorer. I didn’t see the point in doing this as Microsoft wouldn’t be able to browse to the firewall interface. Next you get a new Internet Explorer window with some text added at the end of the title to let you know it’s in compatibility mode. Any tabs you create in this instance will report itself as Internet Explorer 6

It all worked fine even if i did fine the solution a little clunky

Also found some registry files on the Fiddlertool site that changes the user agent string as needed. These changes are more permanent but it’s a preference thing in the end.

So this means i’ll be upgrading my main pc to the latest version!

** Updated on 19/03/2007 **

This has been fixed!

Read my new post here

Internet Explorer, Sonicwall
5 Responses to “Sonicwall Firewalls and Internet Explorer 7”
1. The other steveb - Steve Banks' Blog on SBS and other Small Business Technology Topics November 29th, 2006 at 4:10 am
  
  SonicWALL and IE7
  
  I had heard about this earlier in the fall and forgot about it until working on a TZ170 Enhanced OS the
2. Rory January 9th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
  
  I found the link to your site but had to open it in Opera as IE7 won’t display the blog page!
  Thanks I will give this a go with my Sonicwalls, Rory.
3. andyparkes January 11th, 2007 at 8:54 am
  
  Glad i could help Rory. Not sure why you couldn’t view the blog in IE7
  
  I use IE7 exclusively now so i wrote the post using it and i’m leaving this comment using it?!
4. And as if by magic.. « Andys Techie Blog March 19th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
  
  [...] 1:57 pm | In Sonicwall, Uncategorized | No sooner had a posted about the issues i was having using Sonicwall firewalls with Internet Explorer 7 i received an email from Sonicwall with their take on the [...]
5. marusya_eot October 16th, 2008 at 10:50 am
  
  [url=][/url]
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