Links to local files with Firefox 1.5

This is a little annoyance that has been bugging me infrequently for a while since I moved to the latest version of Firefox. The default settings for this version and previous ones were to disallow links to local files, presumably because a hacker could write a page with sneaky hidden frames and such to read your system settings.

I mentioned before in my old blog that you could enable local links for all pages in Firefox 1.0.x (can't remember the exact version they put it into). This was all well and good, but obviously caused sleepless nights for a few security conscious nerds because in Firefox 1.5 you can do it on a site-by-site basis (I'll sleep a lot easier now).

Go to the URL about:config.

You can add the following three preferences using right click then selecting New -> String.
You'll have to do this for each preference below:

Preference Name	String value
capability.policy.policynames	localfilelinks
capability.policy.localfilelinks.sites	http://yourdomain.com
capability.policy.localfilelinks.checkloaduri.enabled	allAccess

Firefox doesn't show these values on the about:config page even after a restart,
but they do work. You can confirm they have been added by looking at
your prefs.js file. On Windows 2000/XP this is in
Documents and Settings\youruser\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\randomstring.default\prefs.js.

Enter multiple URLs by separating them with a space. For more info including other versions, see Mozillazine.