Browser Kiosk Mode in OS X

Over the years supporting Apple’s OS X the question has come up at least a couple of times a year.

How do I enable browser kiosk mode in my browser?

There have been several solutions over the years the first I came across was the saft plugin for safari. This is a paid plugin and five years ago it was pretty good for what it was. Since then the amount of browsers available for os x has increased. If you’re writing an application for OS X Apple has kindly provided the system calls to enable this in your application. The closest you can get in Firefox is Fullscreen mode which can disable the dock and a few other things, but you have to modify a plist file to do this.

Along came Opera who out of all the browsers have done it the right way, and provided a Kiosk Mode for Windows, Linux, Mac, FreeBSD and Solaris.

Opera Kiosk Mode

Great you say, well actually its fantastic. Because of the supplied system calls Apple has provided, Opera Kiosk Mode on OS X is able to really lock down the machine. So they can’t escape, see the menu bar, the dock, force quit, download and whole range of other things. You can see all options on the link above.

With the combination of a limited account and kiosk mode you can be sure to know that you’ve got a machine that you could use at a conference or trade show for a newsletter signup or displaying your company/institutions website.