Menu
Just a basic html link question.
I have an intranet setup, and I need to link to some network drives. They are located on drives such as \server_drive\blahblah\doc.docx
Using file:// does not work on either IE8 or Firefox. How can I link to these files?
819
In Windows, if you have mapped network drives and you don't know the UNC path for them, you can start a command prompt (Start → Run → cmd.exe) and use the net use command to list your mapped drives and their UNC paths: C:\>net use New connections will be remembered.
If you're using Windows 10, hold down Shift on your keyboard and right-click on the file, folder, or library for which you want a link. If you're using Windows 11, simply right-click on it. Then, select “Copy as path” in the contextual menu.
To link to a UNC path from an HTML document, use file:///// (yes, that's five slashes).
file://///server/path/to/file.txt
Note that this is most useful in IE and Outlook/Word. It won't work in Chrome or Firefox, intentionally - the link will fail silently. Some words from the Mozilla team:
For security purposes, Mozilla applications block links to local files (and directories) from remote files.
And less directly, from Google:
Firefox and Chrome doesn't open "file://" links from pages that originated from outside the local machine. This is a design decision made by those browsers to improve security.
The Mozilla article includes a set of client settings you can use to override this behavior in Firefox, and there are extensions for both browsers to override this restriction.
109
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
