Linking a UNC / Network drive on an html page

Question

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?

Answer 1

Alternative (Insert tooltip to user):

  <style> a.tooltips {position: relative; display: inline;} a.tooltips span { position: absolute;  width:240px;  color: #FFFFFF;  background: #000000;  height: 30px;  line-height: 30px;  text-align: center;  visibility: hidden;  border-radius: 6px; } a.tooltips span:after {  content: '';  position: absolute;  top: 100%;  left: 50%;  margin-left: -8px;  width: 0; height: 0;  border-top: 8px solid #000000;  border-right: 8px solid transparent;  border-left: 8px solid transparent; } a:hover.tooltips span {  visibility: visible;  opacity: 0.8;  bottom: 30px;  left: 50%;  margin-left: -76px;  z-index: 999; } </style>
  <a class="tooltips" href="#">\\server\share\docs<span>Copy link and open in Explorer</span></a>

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

Setup IIS on the network server and change the path to http://server/path/to/file.txt

EDIT: Make sure you enable directory browsing in IIS