Working on new intranet I came across a problem getting links from intranet web pages to files on the company file server to work. These are all coded up along these lines:
<a href="file://f:/blah/blah/pretentious document.doc">Important Company Standard</a>
This worked ok in IE but not in Firefox. Click on a link and nothing happens.
With a lot of experimentation it seemed that this happens when attempting to go from an html page loaded through the http:// protocol to a file page loaaded through the file:// protocol. Testing with a html file on my desktop worked because the desktop file was loaded using the file:// protocol.
I found an article that mentions this as a security feature: it stops web pages linking to files in your local directorys.
I have found that the following steps disable this:
- Open Firefox
- open the url 'about:config'
- find the entry 'security.checkloadurl'
- double click it (this will toggle it from true to false).
IE may treat the local intranet as a 'trusted site' and let me link to files on disk. I don't think there is a way of telling firefox that the intranet is a 'trusted site' and can link to files. I am not sure how many firefox users there are here who would have to tweek their settings.
The biggest annoyance is that you click on the link and nothing happens. Why not a dialog to tell me there may a security problem but to let me go ahead. Silently doing nothing is worse than useless, you don't know what was wrong and you waste a couple of hours finding out why.
Update: 11 Jan 2006: there is more on this topic here.
Peter's Moblog
Firefox Trusted Sites: 1) about:config 2) network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris 3) Enter comma separated list of servers (i.e., intranet,home,company)