Question

We have lots of external links set up of the form: file://... which work fine with Internet Explorer but not with Firefox. Is there a simple solution to this?

I looked at FirefoxBrowser on codev and FirefoxBrowserIssues but this issue is not mentioned.

Environment

-- TamsinTweddell - 02 Nov 2007

Answer

If you answer a question - or someone answered one of your questions - please remember to edit the page and set the status to answered. The status selector is below the edit box.

Have a look at http://kb.mozillazine.org/Links_to_local_pages_don't_work#Firefox_1.5.2C_SeaMonkey_1.0_and_newer

-- MarkusHesse - 03 Nov 2007

I also have the same problem and as is the way Googled my way to what I though was a solution finding the same link as posted by MarkusHesse , unfortunately it did not work.

I then posted a query on http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=3406786#3406786 and got some help in as far as I can now get Firefox to open an external file and folder from a test.html document. The way it worked was to use 5 slashes as in the following examples.

file://///SERVER/FOLDER/ file://///SERVER/FOLDER/MY.EXE

Unfortunately this stiill doesn’t work in a TWiki page, so when I view page source on the TWiki page it looks exactly the same as my test.html doc which works.

Not sure if I needed the user.js fix as well as the 5 slashes and I'm not sure if it’s Apache or TWiki or a bit of both that is still causing me the problem in TWiki but I'm hoping someone can help soon before we throw Firefox out and submit to the will of Microsoft.

-- TWikiGuest - 12 Jun 2008

In my installation "file://///aa/bb" works well with IE and with firefox but there is also a security correction, IE hasn't problem , firefox for security issues for default doesn't allow this. To solve you must modify security policies, you can change firefox profile, it on windows XP stay on directory:

• Documents and setting\xxx\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxx
• NOTE: to discover the directory you can view windows variables with command
  • echo %APPDATA% to know application Data directory or you can go there with command
  • cd %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\*.default

• /home/user/.mozilla/firefox/*.default to find prefs.js

NOTE: Close Firefox before to do any change!!!
put in file prefs.js the follow statements:

user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "localfilelinks");   
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.sites", "http://miowiki.xx.com http://miowiki");
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.checkloaduri.enabled", "allAccess");

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Links_to_local_pages_don%27t_work

-- PieroGin - 17 Jun 2008

Hi I have this same issue, my main difference that im not linking to the local file from a webiste, but from a local file. So how do you reference the local environment when lising the "sites" attribute ??

-- BenPatterson - 06 Aug 2008

I have the same problem and it doesnt solve the problem.

Let me add one thing. If you save a code form twiki to a single local file as eg test.htm and open it up in a firefox it works perfect line IE. It is not a security issue because it does work in a browser.

Please any clever answer.

-- TomaszTrochanowski - 15 Jan 2009

See SID-00038

-- PeterThoeny - 15 Jan 2009