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Is there a way to make firefox open hyperlinks to local files?

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My company has a custom developed ticketing system and of course its developed for IE but none of the engineers like IE. We all use and want to continue using Firefox. One of the sections in the ticketing system has a spot for links to local files on a shared drive. I have created the link and it points to a word document. That hyperlink works fine in IE but it does nothing when clicked in Firefox.

Of course the dev team is giving me the age old line ".NET doesn't play nice with Firefox... developed for IE.... blah blah use IE."

Surely creating a link to a local file like excel or word or even a directory is simple idea and should be accomplished somehow with FireFox right? Can anyone shed some light on this and give a suggestion how to make this work?

For example: N:\KNOWLEDGE BASE\Cisco Price List\2012\pricelistaugust2012.xlsx i am trying to share with a hyperlink like:

Looking for any suggestions on how to make this work. Thank you so much!!

My company has a custom developed ticketing system and of course its developed for IE but none of the engineers like IE. We all use and want to continue using Firefox. One of the sections in the ticketing system has a spot for links to local files on a shared drive. I have created the link and it points to a word document. That hyperlink works fine in IE but it does nothing when clicked in Firefox. Of course the dev team is giving me the age old line ".NET doesn't play nice with Firefox... developed for IE.... blah blah use IE." Surely creating a link to a local file like excel or word or even a directory is simple idea and should be accomplished somehow with FireFox right? Can anyone shed some light on this and give a suggestion how to make this work? For example: N:\KNOWLEDGE BASE\Cisco Price List\2012\pricelistaugust2012.xlsx i am trying to share with a hyperlink like: <a href=file://companyname.local\Shares\Services\KNOWLEDGE BASE\Cisco Price List\2012\pricelistaugust2012.xlsx Looking for any suggestions on how to make this work. Thank you so much!!

Valgt løsning

I think there are two aspects to this:

(1) URL format

If you navigate to that file using the browser's Open File dialog (Ctrl+O), you can get the workable link format for it. For example, the separators will be forward slashes instead of backslashes.

(2) Local file security

Firefox limits access from pages on web servers to pages on local disk or UNC paths. This article has more info: Links to local pages do not work - MozillaZine Knowledge Base. This extension provides a workaround: LocalLink (I haven't tried it myself).

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Sorry, that got mangled because of the hyperlink i posted.

This is the link to the file i want to open: N:\KNOWLEDGE BASE\Cisco Price List\2012\pricelistaugust2012.xlsx

I try making the link with this. This works in IE. file://companyname.local\Shares\Services\KNOWLEDGE BASE\Cisco Price List\2012\pricelistaugust2012.xlsx

Endret av kwoodhouse

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Valgt løsning

I think there are two aspects to this:

(1) URL format

If you navigate to that file using the browser's Open File dialog (Ctrl+O), you can get the workable link format for it. For example, the separators will be forward slashes instead of backslashes.

(2) Local file security

Firefox limits access from pages on web servers to pages on local disk or UNC paths. This article has more info: Links to local pages do not work - MozillaZine Knowledge Base. This extension provides a workaround: LocalLink (I haven't tried it myself).

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Hi, Thanks for the reply.

I was able to install that addon and get links working. I had to remove all spaces from the directories and file names though as the spaces would turn into % and would cause issues with the link opening correctly.

I will keep testing. Thanks again.

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In a URL, a space can be represented by %20 but it's easier to replace them with underscores (_) in the file and folder names.