Is it possible to switch firefox to use a different DNS than what is in the windows.host file? For example, I have a development site on a different server but I'm trying to copy content over from the live site so it'd be handy to have the live site in IE and the dev site in FF. I tried FoxyProxy but I can't seem to get it to work.
Thanks!
What about having different names for your dev and prod servers? That should avoid any confusions and you'd not have to edit the hosts file every time.
DNS resolving is usually done at the system level and not at the application level, so you can't normally have one program use one dns and another program use a different dns. I'm not aware of any firefox extensions that allow you to use a different dns.
I wonder if you could write a custom rule for Fiddler to do what you want? IE uses no proxy, Firefox points to Fiddler, Fiddler uses custom rule to direct requests to the dev server...
It appears from your question that you already have a second set of DNS servers available that reference the development site instead of the live site.
I would suggest that you simply run a standard SOCKS proxy either on that DNS server system or on a low-end spare system and have that system configured to use the development DNS server. You can then tell Firefox to use that proxy instead of downloading pages directly.
Doing it this way, the actual DNS lookups will be done on the proxy machine and not on the machine that's running the web browser.
I am using the SwitchHost extension exactly for this problem: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/14258
It is easy to configure, and even more easy to switch hosts.