How it works

URL Lock prevents users from navigating to web sites except for those that are allowed through one or more administrator-defined rules, which are written as Perl-compatible regular expressions. Users can either exist either on the local computer or across an ActiveDirectory network.

By operating as a browser helper object, the IE URL Lock restricts which locations a user can navigate to within both Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer windows. Active IEURLLock instances automatically detect changes to their registry values and will reload their configurations at their next navigation events, making real-time configuration adjustments on a local PC possible. On ActiveDirectory PCs, users will need to either log off and log back on, run gpupdate, or wait for the next automatic background policy update to see the policy changes.

The Mozilla Firefox version of URL Lock exists in the source code repository, but has not yet been released. It is shelved at present with no plans for being released.