Have you tried disabling the local link protection as explained in the mozillaZine KB article? That should work according to this question.

extra info

This is on Windows 7

- I cd to %appdata%\Mozilla

There are 2 prefs.js files

AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\q8fcarer.default AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xanpdkkm.dev-edition-default

I put entries in both, I think the previous issue was I trying to alter those files with Firefox open

Now If I click on the link it just opens about:blank in a new tab (which is at least a step forward)

If I make a new tab and set the url to be file://somemachine/Share/test.docx then it does nothing

Just to add, right click and 'save link as' doesn't work either

Preferably you should not (in fact never) edit any of those 2 prefs files but add a user.js file with the following text in one or both of these profile folders instead. You may also need to use 3 forward slashes for the URIs, as opposed to other browsers.

user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "localfilelinks"); user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.sites", "http://servername:port"); user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.checkloaduri.enabled", "allAccess");

Thanks, tried both the 2 user.js files and changing the url , no joy, I get the same result. It opens a new tab for about:blank but doesn't then open the file. It doesn't make a difference if I run Firefox as Administrator

The file is a docx, the association in Windows is for "Word (desktop)"

Admitted, I never used this myself in intranet environments so am afraid I cannot help troublehoot it. Perhaps it’s an idea to send a PM to the owner of the question referred to? Maybe he/she can provide you with any missing info, possibly related to other software and settings in corporate environments.

The only thing that I can think of now is that MIME types might need to be set properly by the server in order to let Firefox know how to handle the file and Firefox should be familiar with these types, or it will offer to save files by default. See Manage file types and download actions in Firefox for more.

You would expect to get a blank page left behind in this scenario. You could compare Open File (from the File menu, tap the Alt key to activate). But you also would expect to get the Download dialog in both cases. Do you get it with Open File?

Sorry for the delay, been off over Christmas

(1) From the browser url bar:

Neither of these work

file://machinename/Share/blank.docx file:///machinename/Share/blank.docx

But this does

\\machinename\Share\blank.docx

(2) From the File->Open File dialog

These work

file://machinename/Share/blank.docx \\machinename\Share\blank.docx

this doesn't

file:///machinename/Share/blank.docx

(3) Within the actual webpage none of the above works

I've tried a few different urls http://localhost:port http://someothermachine:port

We have an external address with a valid ssl certificate

https://externalmachine:port

No joy regardless

I've had a discussion with nm079 (from https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1185059)

Network paths don't work for him either

His workaround is to map network drives, so use

file://z:/blank.docx

instead of

file://somemachine/etc

Also, from his email

"With regards to the mapping of network drives - it can be done by a logon script (the best way as it does it for all users on all PCs they log in to) or manually by going into 'Computer' and clicking 'Map a network drive' at the top"

In summary, there's a workaround but if Firefox is supposed to support it then it appears to be broken