Open a direct file on the hard drive from firefox (file:///)

Question

Hi, 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.

Answer 1

Which syntax did you use? The correct syntax for e.g. c:/path/to/file.ext would have been file:///c:/path/to/file.ext. Edit: not relevant anymore as OP has edited his question to include the syntax.

Note that this doesn't work at all if the file is stored at the server machine which in turn is a physically different machine than the client machine (where the webbrowser runs).

Answer 2

Access to local files in Firefox can't be done unfortunately due to security restrictions. As far as I know (I have asked here repeated times myself) it's not even possible to allow select sites through a configuration setting or similar.

There is a workaround (ponentially unsafe and to be handled with care), you could register a custom protocol as outlined in this question.

Answer 3

Although i still think it is a programming question, it was answered here: http://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".