Open a direct file on the hard drive from firefox (file:///)
Solution 1
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.aviWhile 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".
Solution 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.
Solution 3
Which syntax did you use? The correct syntax for e.g. Edit: not relevant anymore as OP has edited his question to include the syntax.c:/path/to/file.ext
would have been file:///c:/path/to/file.ext
.
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).
Solution 4
I used symlink for windows added that file to my resources folder by creating symlink. How to create symlink shown here for windows http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/278262-mklink-create-use-links-windows.html
That worked for me while same problem. Cheers!
Comments
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aviv almost 2 years
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. Whilehref="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.