I am not sure how long this has been around in Firefox, but at least in the latest version of Firefox 3 beta for Mac I stumbled cross this trick. This morning while working on other things I accidentally dropped a folder from the Finder into a Firefox window I had in the background. Imagine my surprise when I saw what you see in the image above. Firefox displayed the contents of the folder in a file browser like structure. I could navigate up and down the directory tree and there was even an option to turn on and off viewing of invisible files. I did notice that it won’t allow you to navigate to the root of your hard drive, but files that can be viewed normally in a browser (like image files or Quicktime movies) will show up right inside Firefox. They have also done a very nice job with the user interface. It sorta reminds me of .Mac.
Now normally this shouldn’t be surprising considering that many browsers can view file systems on remote servers (if the feature is turned on and allowed in the server configuration), but this works locally. I also know that Internet Explorer on Windows has been able to do this trick for years, but this is on a Mac. The trick also does not work in Safari, at least not in the current version of Safari running under OS 10.5.2.
Thanks for this tip. I just messed around with it for a few minutes and discovered a useful tool. I went to my Documents folder in the file structure created by Firefox and bookmarked it on my bookmark bar. The upshot of this is that instead of just adding a bookmark, Firefox created a drop down folder allowing me to access all folders and files in my documents without ever navigating away from Firefox. This, of course, could be done with any folder you browse to… I just found my documents to be the most useful. Hope you find this useful.
ps. This is my first post but I’ve been listening to the Maccast religiously since I switched about a year ago.
Try dropping an application icon into the Firefox window. (loads of stuff)
Great tips thanks for sharing !!
it works in firefox 2 also under 10.4.11, just not the same features.
I do not notice about this. Let’s me check it out.
Anyway, thanks for sharing this informations
An awesome find, I checked it out and it also works in Flock and Camino.
I also run a broweser called Fluidinstance but it doesnt work on that one….
Cool stuff though
good job firefox