Recently, I tried updating the browser for a WebPageTest instance to IE9. This proved to have some issues, specifically due to the pop-up dialogues that IE9 has now to tell you when something suspicious occurs.

Logging into WPT, I was greeted with an error on an IE9 browser opened by URLblast. Something along the lines of:

“Are you sure you want to use this Non-Verified plugin?”

Of course, the non-verified plugin was the WebPageTest hook. In order to get that working, I modified the security settings on my browser to not care about non-verified plugins:

Internet Options (clicking on that gear icon in IE9) -> Security -> Custom Level.

I modified two settings:

  • “Download unsigned ActiveX controls” to Enable (not secure)
  • “Initialize and script ActiveX controls not marked as safe for scripting” to Enable (not secure)

This then brought me to another error, with IE9 complaining about not using secure settings. Something like:

“Your current settings are insecure”

Well, after some searching, there’s apparently a policy that you can set that disables this specific message:

http://windowsconnected.com/forums/p/959/3087.aspx#3087

Basically it says:

Run gpedit.msc (if you type ‘gpedit.msc’ in the search bar it comes up)

Then Navigate to Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Internet Exporer, and right click and enable the “Turn off the Security Settings Check feature” policy.

This gets rid of the error, but then WebPageTest just seems to freeze on a run. After some more searching, there was one final step in the solution. It seems that urlblast has to open the browser using the user’s account. By default, urlblast creates and uses a specific account on which it opens a browser, not necessarily the user that is running urlblast. Having the account opening the browser be an administrator did the trick, and in my situation, I just had it be the same account running urlblast. This can be done with a change in urlblast.ini:

Use Current Account=1

And that did it for me!