Ubuntu
webbrowser-app package

Ubuntu Web Browser does not recognise file:///

Bug #1646978 reported by Tommy Pollák on 2016-12-02

This bug report is a duplicate of: Bug #1563214: Can’t browse and view local HTML files in home folder. Edit Remove

This bug affects 1 person

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	webbrowser-app (Ubuntu)	New	Undecided	Unassigned

Bug Description

The URL file:///media/OS/Users/Tommy/Documents/index.html results in "Network Error It appears you are having trouble viewing: file:///media/OS/Users/Tommy/Documents/index.html. Please check your network settings and try refreshing the page." in the Ubuntu Web Browser, whereas both Firefox and Chromium show the file without any problems.

Ubuntu 16.10, release 16.10

~$ apt-cache policy webbrowser-app
webbrowser-app:
  Installed: 0.23+16.10.20161018-0ubuntu1
  Candidate: 0.23+16.10.20161018-0ubuntu1
  Version table:
*** 0.23+16.10.20161018-0ubuntu1 500
        500 http://se.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu yakkety-updates/main i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     0.23+16.10.20160928-0ubuntu1 500
        500 http://se.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu yakkety/main i386 Packages
~$

I guess the browser can not show URLS starting with file:///. This seems to be a bug

Revision history for this message

Tommy Pollák (tpollak) wrote on 2017-01-15:

The answer to bug 1563214:
I found that is possible to browse and open local files, simply in the
search bar put the file/directory path, for example: "/home/phablet/my-
html-file.html"
does not work for me. The incomplete URL is immediately changed to file:///... and gives the result described in the bug description.

I think that the problem is that "local" URLs can not be shown. http://localhost/... works fine.

I have removed the link "Is duplicate of bug 1563214."

Revision history for this message

Olivier Tilloy (osomon) wrote on 2017-01-16:

I am marking this as a duplicate of bug #1563214 again. The "workaround" described in that bug doesn't work for me either, and is not supposed to work indeed.
This is really the same bug.