I have a page that I use to drive file download testing (see URL link, above). This page has file: URL links. Clicking on these links doesn't do anything. No alert, no status bar update, no nothing. I believe this is due to a call to something like checkLoadURI failing when called from the link click handler. I'm not what the security risk is in processing such links. All it does is let the user access data that is already accessible to them (i.e., I can Copy Link Location and paset to the location bar to load it). It worked in 4.x and works in IE. Anyway, this makes it harder to do my testing of file download and I want to make sure it's not just a bug.

Bill, I talked this over with Gagan. Blocking file:// links from http pages was a policy decision, not a bug. It prevents some malicious or annoying behavior such as linking to a /dev/ file on Unix. I understand why this may be a bit too restrictive; basically, it's still an open issue. In the meantime, setting the "security.checkloaduri" pref to false in prefs.js will turn off the check on file:// access. This should get your tests working. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 40538 ***

OK, I can live with that. Two points: 1. We might should determine how widespread use of file: url links is. 2. At a minimum, we should alert the user so they don't keep clicking on the link wondering what's going on. Maybe that alert could ask if it's OK to go ahead and load it?

Verified dupe.