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Clicking on MS Office documents opens the file within Internet Explorer, but not in Firefox. Why not?

April 26, 2017documents file firefox internet explorer MS Office opens

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Clicking on MS Office documents opens the file within Internet Explorer, but not in Firefox. Why not?

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A. There are security concerns about letting a Web page control behavior on an end users machine. The Web is designed so that the things a Web page can do are very limited. For the most part, with regards links to documents, a Web page can only make a call to the browser to display the document (and then the browser makes a call to the operating system). Normally, a Web page cannot tell a browser how or where to open that document. Because if it could, then malicuous people could do very bad things. So how a non-Web format document opens up depends on 1) the end users browser and 2) the end users operating system. You will find that the behavior you are seeing is not even consistent against all instances of IE (because someone may have configured their browser’s security settings to behave differently). Now, I did say for the most part. I said this because it is possible to write a script that has a Web page do certain things with regards opening documents.