Due to deployment times, we often have to make quick changes before other departments can catch up. One such example is IP deployments. It can take the corporate network team 48+ hours to get us a new IP address. This means to get a new site up and running quickly, we have to use a different port on a web server for initial testing. When attempting to test this new port in Firefox, firefox popped up an interesting error, one I’ve not seen before…
This address is restricted: This address uses a network port which is normally used for purposes other than Web browsing. Firefox has cancelled the request for your protection.
What? The site was running on port 79, so I know it was non-standard, but why did you block access? It never blocked access before, and I’ve used some weird ports before. I did a port 8000 passthru on my firewall at home, that works. Port 8000 isn’t normally used for web browsing, but proxying (slightly different).
A quick google shows this feature can be turned off using the about:config, more details can be found here on Scott Salyer’s blog. He also rants that this seems to be a relatively stupid feature, as well as a few others mentioned on his blog, namely Scott Bellware, and Sam Gentile, who also seem to dislike stupid security features.
[EDIT] As it appears the servers have vanished for Scott Salyer’s blog, a new link to here with details on how to resolve.