Question

I have a website that will always runs on my localhost so I was wondering if I can directly launch excel files.

I see a post here Launch file:// from Firefox or Chrome with this as solution

user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "localfilelinks");
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.sites", "file:///[[PUT SERVER NAME HERE]]";);
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.checkloaduri.enabled",  "allAccess");

but as my site will run on localhost I would like to know if there are any other ways, I even tried file:// but it opens a download dialog.

I am only interested in firefox solution but others will be appreciated too.

Answer 1

<a href="file:///C:\sample.xls">test</a>

Works for me in all browsers. (open file dialog pops. hope you don’t think FF will open the excel file natively, as it won’t.)