How can I make Internet Explorer run in a secure kiosk mode?

Asked by chromaBYTE (652

) October 26th, 2008

I already know about running it in Kiosk Mode by giving IE a ”-k” switch, however in this mode users can still get out of the window incredibly easily by just hitting Alt+F4, Alt+Tab or just hitting the windows key.

Is it possible to set up a computer so that the windows explorer cannot be accessed at all? Don’t want address bar, forward/back buttons, nothing.

What about different programs that will help me achieve this?

This is for a catalogue system, like a book search you would see in a library.

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2 Answers

Opera’s kiosk mode is better than IE’s, so if it’s possible for you to switch to Opera, that’d help you on your way.

See here for details:
http://www.opera.com/support/mastering/kiosk/index.dml

Since Opera runs on Mac OS X and Linux as well as Windows, this also gives you the freedom to switch away from Windows if you’d like. Windows is mostly fine too – the only hitch is that if the kiosk machine is running Windows 2000/XP and you’d like to prevent Ctrl-Alt-Del from working, you’ll need to customize Windows’ “GINA” to do so; see here for details (also linked from Opera’s article, above).

Of course, the same limitation with Ctrl-Alt-Del, and therefore need to customize Windows, apply to IE – so even if you’re committed to Windows, using Opera (if you can) will still get you closer to your goal than using IE will.

If you must use IE’s rendering engine, a Google search for kiosk browser turned up a few fairly affordable programs which just wrap IE’s renderer in a better kiosk mode.

jasonjackson (1160

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