Open a direct file on the hard drive from Firefox (file:///)

I have a small PHP system I created for myself. This system contains a few .doc and .docx file documents. I want to be able to open them directly from the browser without downloading them.

I created a link: <a href="file:///c:/mysite/myfile.docx">myfile</a>. But Firefox does not open the link. href="http://localhost/myfile.docx" works fine - it offers me to download the file.

Any ideas on how I can do it? Do I need to change something in the Firefox options or security settings?

Solution 1:

Both Firefox and IE8 support the File URI scheme.

Here are some examples valid for Windows systems, referring to the same file c:\WINDOWS\clock.avi

file://localhost/c|/WINDOWS/clock.avi
file:///c|/WINDOWS/clock.avi
file://localhost/c:/WINDOWS/clock.avi
file:///c:/WINDOWS/clock.avi

While the last is the most obvious and human-readable, the first one is the most complete and correct one.

Apparently (from the same url):

Mozilla browsers refuse to follow file URLs on a page that it has fetched with the HTTP protocol.

but:

Mozilla browsers can be configured to override this security restriction as detailed in Mozillazine's "Links to Local Pages Don't Work".