Open A File In A Local Program

So you have a file on your PC and you want to make life easy for yourself and create a link from a personal home page in your browser to that file. But you want a program, like NotePad to open that file. What do you do?

You can search the internet high and low and you’ll find several javascript, php and visual basic solutions. But isn’t that a little over kill? Yes, yes it is. There’s a lot of information about why you can’t do this, or don’t want to do this. And some of that is valid. If this webpage was online and available to the world, the last thing you want to do is click a link that will run an executable file. That’s a huge security risk. Yes indeed it is.

But recently I had a need to simply open a text file  on my pc, in Notepad. Now I could have changed how the browser handles files like this and anytime it finds a .txt file, it can open Notepad instead of displaying the file in the browser. But that’s not what I wanted to do. I only want Notepad to open for this one file, on this one page, for this one link. There’s got to be an easier way than all that overkill coding!

Of course there is. And a huge thanks to my very smart friends on MozillaZine – a Message Board for everything Mozilla. And in particular a big thanks to Gingerbread Man! I love that place. Now let me say this solution does not work with Chrome or IE. All I can suggest there is…use Firefox. Continue reading →