How to turn Firefox into Windows Explorer File Manager

Posted on January 1, 2008 at 6:30 am

Firefox is a great web browser and it has a tons of cool features that Internet Explorer does not have! Of course, IE copied the whole multiple tabs feature from Firefox, but it still can’t beat Firefoxs exceptional add-in collection. With thousands of cool plug-ins to choose from, your Firefox browser can do just about everything from capturing web pages to playing music to monitoring you Google Adsense account!

However, most Firefox users are running on the Windows OS and one thing that Internet Explorer can do that Firefox so far cannot is the fact that it can double as a file manager, allowing you to run Windows Explorer directly in the IE interface.

By default, you cannot use Windows Explorer inside the Firefox interface. However, with a simple little plugin, you can browse your files and folders in Firefox with the Explorer interface!

Use Firefox as Windows Explorer

In order to do this, you need to install the IE Tab plugin for Firefox. It’s quite a popular plugin and you might already have it installed. It basically loads up an Internet Explorer window into Firefox.

Once you have the plugin installed, go ahead and open a new tab and then convert it into an IE tab. You can switch to IE, by clicking on the Firefox icon in the status bar at the bottom right.

You can also add the switch icon to your toolbar by going to View, Toolbars and then Customize.

You should see an icon called IE Tab, go ahead and drag and drop that icon onto the toolbar area next to the Home, Refresh, and Stop buttons.

Now that you have your tab in IE mode, simply type in the file URL for your drive or folder. The file extension to access the file system is file:/// followed by the local drive you want to access via Windows Explorer. So if you wanted to access the C drive, you would type file:///C:/.

The cool thing about this is that you can also bookmark your locations in Firefox just as if it were another web page. The next time you want to access some files, simply click on your bookmarked link!

You can now see the difference between type in the above in Firefox with it’s default implementation:

And what the interface looks like when you open it in an IE window with the IE tab plugin installed:

And that’s it! Now you can browse your hard drive using the Windows Explorer interface in Firefox! Sweet! I myself have ditched IE, but still run on Windows. This was one thing I was really missing from IE. Enjoy!

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2 Responses to “How to turn Firefox into Windows Explorer File Manager”

Syahid A. said on : January 2nd, 2008 at 9:37 am

wow this is as cool as it can get with firefox!

akishore said on : January 2nd, 2008 at 11:38 am

Syahid,yeah it’s a really nifty little trick! Makes it so easy to use Windows Explorer inside Firefox! I’m glad you enjoyed it.