…maybe the server is bored, and tired of answering the same set of 3 questions all the time, so it just goes YEAH YEAH, I know there’s two more coming after this…BLAH BLAH echo right back at you.

…or maybe the network is so good that the server can SENSE and anticipate the requests from the client. In that case I wonder if they patented the process. You should quit your job and study this. If you can be the one to patent it, it’ll be worth it.

“For security purposes, Mozilla applications block links to local files (and directories) from remote files.”

And then go on to listing a number of exploits which are avoided.

I guess Microsoft does not consider this feature a security risk for Internet Explorer, but they also have the Zones concept which might be useful in this respect.

I’m using Firefox w/ WindowsXP and I’d like to be able to easily have people use share drives to place content for our new wiki (most of our existing content is already located on share drives). Right now every PC would need to be setup with this update before it would work.

Windows Internet Explorer can do the same thing with file://. It seems to me that firefox should just give a setting (that could be turned on/off for security) that allows the same behavior and all would be well.

Thanks,
Sten

As to Brians’ question… hmm, well the URL “file://C|Documents%20and%2Settings” on a standard install of 2K/2K3/XP install should take you to the local user profile folder on any browser.

You can, (scarily easily as many hoax spyware ads have shown) embed the Explorer folder view for any particular directory in to a webpage… and that will work on any Windows machine with IE4+… basically win95 SP1 and newer.

The idea of making a plugin for FF that would do it without embedding IE is rather more tricky. Explorer replacements are usually either quite expensive, rather under functional, or oft times both. The reason is that many programs require close integration with the Windows default GUI Shell (explorer.exe) and it’s numerous (tho with the recent disclosure agreement reducing) undocumented features.

Features typically lacking include, but are not limited to, Context menu extensions, tool bar extensions (band objects), DDE linkage, parameter passing, clipboard handling for file linkage, drag and drop compatibility, image preview extensions, web view, unusual executables (VBS, WSH, HTX et el) etc.

If you are happy enough to just root through the filesystem and have explorer run anything you click on after “downloading” it from your own hard drive… the “file://” URL form is your friend… anything more than that is really… really beyond the abilities of a plugin system based on Java that is supposed to be largely platform independent.

I will update the code to reflect this.

Thank you.