Using VMWare Fusion to sandbox your browsing

Over the last few months, and much thanks to @SGGrc of Security Now, I've been trying to find a way to use virtualization to help sandbox my web browsing.

Of course, this idea is not one of my own, Steve pretty much described it, except that he didn't know of a convenient way to make it work. Well it seem that the folk at VMware had this figure out along time ago.

Requirements:

  • VMWare Fusion 8
  • Installed Windows OS with all guest additions installed

  1. Locate the VMWare start menu and access your os from it

    image showing the toolbar

  2. VMWare > Preferences > Default Application | and choose Internet Explorer -- Windows 10

    image showing the default application menu of vmware and default application selection

That's it!

Now any link you click from your mail, twitter client or rss feed will automatically open in the IE inside of windows 10.

This should work with any OS. Not just windows 10.

Demo:

A really crappy gif showing it in action


November 10 2015