Enable Firefox to Open Local Files Linked From an Intranet Website

Often an Intranet website will have links that reference files (such as Word documents, PDFs, Excel spreed sheets) located on mapped network drives (such as file://N:/share/myword.doc). In Internet Explorer, clicking on such links will download the referenced file to the client and open it. Unfortunately, this does not work in Firefox without some manual configuration. My understanding is Firefox has disabled this feature by default to prevent malicious web sites from trying to link to and open files in your local directories (a security policy that Internet Explorer choose to ignore).

You can configure Firefox to download and open files linked from explicitly specified websites to the client's local drive (and mapped drives) by adding the following to the file user.js (create this file if it doesn't exist) in Firefox's profile directory (which should be something like: C:\Documents and Settings\Caleb\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\abcde123.default, where abcde123 could be any sequence of characters):

user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "localfilelinks");
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.sites",
   "http://web.intranet.com");
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.checkloaduri.enabled",
   "allAccess");

You can specify more than one web site by separating each address with a space. For example, to add both http://web.intranet.com and http://web, use:

user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "localfilelinks");
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.sites",
   "http://web.intranet.com http://web");
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.checkloaduri.enabled",
   "allAccess");

I'm using Firefox 3.0, but I believe the above is true for all versions of Firefox greater than 1.5.

Internet Explorer 8 Standards Compliant ("Compatibility") Switches

Internet Explorer 8 is the most standards compliant version of IE yet. To ensure backwards compatibility with existing web pages that target IE7 (and to a lesser extent, IE6), IE8 has standards compliant and non-compliant modes. Following are three methods to select one or the other mode:

1. Compliant mode is enabled by default for web pages on the Internet and disabled for web pages on the Intranet. [1]
2. When in compliant mode, a GUI button is available to switch to non-compliant mode. [1,4]
3. Force a particular mode for a given web page by inserting the meta element at the start of the head section, "before all other elements except the title element and other meta elements."[2] For compliant mode use <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" /> and for non-compliant mode use <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" /> [1,2,3]

One other note: from JavaScript, the property document.documentMode will be present and set to 8 when compliant mode is used, otherwise this property doesn't exist. [1,2]

References

[1] D. Esposito, "Internet Explorer 8 and Compatibility Views", Dr. Dobbs Digest, March 2009
[2] MSDN, "Defining Document Compatibility".aspx), Feb 2009
[3] diTii.com, D'Technology Weblog, "IE8: Standards mode and IE7 compatibility mode", Aug 27, 2008
[4] IEBlog, "Introducing Compatibility View", Aug 27, 2008

Links: reStructuredText for Python Documentation

Here are some links regarding reStructuredText used in Python docstrings (source code comments) and Sphinx, Python's new documentation system:

• docutils
• epydoc
• PEP-0287
• Sphinx