Linking a UNC / Network drive on an html page

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?

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.

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

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>