Open a direct file on the hard drive from firefox (file:///)
firefox, html, security, web-applications
Solution
Although i still think it is a programming question, it was answered here: https://superuser.com/questions/103026/open-a-direct-file-on-the-hard-drive-from-firefox-file
Both Firefox and IE8 support the File URI scheme.
Here are some examples valid for Windows systems, referring to the same file c:\WINDOWS\clock.avi
file://localhost/c|/WINDOWS/clock.avi file:///c|/WINDOWS/clock.avi file://localhost/c:/WINDOWS/clock.avi file:///c:/WINDOWS/clock.avi
While the last is the most obvious and human-readable, the first one is the most complete and correct one.
Apparently (from the same url):
Mozilla browsers refuse to follow file URLs on a page that it has fetched with the HTTP protocol.
but:
Mozilla browsers can be configured to override this security restriction as detailed in Mozillazine's "Links to Local Pages Don't Work".
Problem
I have a small php system i created for myself. This system contains a few .doc and .docx file documents. I want to be able to open them directly from the browser and not downloading them. I created a link: `<a href="file:///c:/mysite/myfile.docx">myfile</a>` But FireFox does not open the link. While `href="http://localhost/myfile.docx"` works fine - it offers me to download the file. Any ideas how can i do it? Maybe change something in firfox options / security settings? And if you are at it, is there any chance to do it in IE8? Thanks.