Determining the IE Zone

IE10 Site zone Info

In the “Internet Options” menu item of Internet Explorer, you can add websites to particular zones. If you don’t manually do this, IE seems to allocate the websites for itself. Today, I was attempting to debug an issue, and I wondered “Does Internet Explorer understand this website is on its intranet”? For that matter, how can I tell which of the five zones any particular website has been assigned to? As a reminder, the IE zones are:

0. My Computer
1. Local Intranet Zone
2. Trusted Sites Zone
3. Internet Zone
4. Restricted Sites Zone,

It turns out that the information I wanted is not available in the status bar of IE10, or off any of the menus. But, you can find it easily, if you know to right-click anywhere on the website in question and select the Properties menu item. As a bonus, the resulting popup also tells you whether “Protected Mode” is enabled for that particular zone. By default, “Protected Mode” is enabled for zones 1, 3, and 4 above. However, it could have been disabled by unchecking the “Enabled Protected Mode” checkbox available in “Internet Options” | Security tab.