One thing about Firefox that’s always bugged me is the inability to access links to files and folders using file://.
After some research it appears that this ability is disabled for security reasons. Fair enough, but I want to use it at work.
I have a page on my Intranet with links to installations and folders but they are all located on network shares, not hosted by
So, to enable this you have to add a file to your Firefox profile called user.js
To do it just make a new empty text file and name it user.js
If you already have a user.js file you can edit it and add the following lines:
user_pref(“capability.policy.policynames”, “offlineok”);
user_pref(“capability.policy.offlineok.sites”, “http://YourDomain.com”);
user_pref(“capability.policy.offlineok.sites”, “http://YourOtherDomain.com”);
user_pref(“capability.policy.offlineok.checkloaduri.enabled”, “allAccess”);
Now when you click on a “File://” link from one of the specified domains it will allow it to be accessed.
One think to keep in mind when making links to use this way, Firefox wants the “File://” link to look like this: “File://///” when linking to a file or folder on a network share. When linking to a local file or folder you can just use the “File://”
Note: Sometimes when copying code like the above the quotation marks can get changed by different browsers and text editors, so if it’s not working when you put it into the user.js file check that the quotation marks are normal.