253186 - Incorrect parsing of UNC file:// paths

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 70871

(Core :: Networking: File, defect)

Description

[Gavin Lambert]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8

This is faintly related to bug 70871, and possibly a few others filed later. 
However I've read all that I could find, and none of them seem to address the
core problem.

File URIs have two different formats, as defined in the RFC:
  file://server/path/on/server
  file:///path/on/local/machine

A UNC path represents a path to a file on a (probably) remote server, though it
will of course have to be on the LAN.

Now these *are* accessible by a "path on the local machine" (with some
stretching of the truth), and I've seen this posted most often as the workaround
for this bug in Mozilla; you can get to \\dataserver\files\format14.xsl by
specifying it as file://///dataserver/files/format14.xsl.  This URL (with five
slashes) works in my Firefox browser at present.

However it is better represented as file://dataserver/files/format14.xsl --
"dataserver" is after all a server name in exactly the manner specified in the
URI spec, it merely happens to be on the LAN rather than on the Net.  This form
does NOT work at present.

MSIE accepts the latter form (and in fact will convert a five-slashes URL into a
two-slashes URL).  It's also the most common way UNC paths are represented as
URLs.  It's therefore nonsensical that this doesn't work in Firefox/Mozilla.

As you can tell from the sample URL I have provided, this occurred for me
initially when specifying the default stylesheet for an XML file.  I
double-click the XML file in the filesystem, and Firefox gives me an error page
saying that it could not find the stylesheet, merely because the URL used two
slashes instead of five.

The problem is considerably worse if you enter a two-slashed UNC URL in the
location bar - Firefox does NOTHING AT ALL.  At the very least it should display
a messagebox saying "I don't know what the frick that is".  No user feedback
whatsoever is not a good look.

We have lots of similar files and similarly rendered UNC paths on our intranet
(both filesystem->filesystem and intranet site->filesystem).  Currently most
people in the company are using MSIE, which is happy with this.  Problems like
this do *not* help the cause of trying to promote Firefox in the workplace! :)

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create an XSL file on a network share.
2. Create an XML file on a local drive.
3. Include the path to the XSL file as an xml-stylesheet processing instruction,
using a two-slashed URL (such as file://dataserver/files/format14.xsl).
4. Load the XML file in Firefox/Mozilla.

Actual Results:  
Error message; unable to load the stylesheet.

Expected Results:  
It should have loaded the stylesheet and displayed the XML file correctly.

The existing "workaround" (using five slashes) is not sufficient.  You cannot
expect the world to change from a sensible URL to a less sensible one, just
because it doesn't work in Mozilla, but does everywhere else.

Comment 1

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 70871 ***