That's interesting, I didn't knew Firefox is able to show files inside jars. Don't you know how common is this jar:file://C:/... pattern along browsers?

Today I used IDEA for the first time. I'm no less than impressed with many of the features it offers.

However when i tried to integrate JDK 5.0 documentation into IDEA (using jdk-1_5_0-doc.zip file) i found that same "jar://..." annoying issue. I do that integration so easily in Eclipse that it's kind of depressing i cannot have the same functionality in IDEA. Eclipse simply reads from the jdk-1_5_0-doc.zip file (in the case of JKD 5.0 documentation) and offers the desired javadoc page on its local webserver. Can't be that hard to do the same in IDEA.

These little details make a big difference when choosing a development platform.

Keep up the greak work.

This issue is going to cause much more headache in IntelliJ 7.x. The maven 2 integration (which is fantastic) downloads and configures the javadoc path for all of a module's dependencies. But IntelliJ won't launch the java doc that it configured. That is annoying. Manually extracting the jar and configuring the path isn't an option, because IntelliJ will overwrite my changes during the next maven 2 project synchronization.

As the submitter pointed out, Firefox does handle viewing files inside a jar. I verified the submitters fix works on Firefox 2.0.0.4 on SLED 10. I can even navigate to other documents within the jar.

An alternative to the jar:file syntax is to optionally explode the jar to a temp directory.

Please fix this. Thanks.

This is a duplicate of IDEABKL-2127

I've created an Idea Plugin that handles this issue. It's called JarDoc and is available at Idea's plugin repository. It was particularly tedious to handle on OS X, because the
jar:file//... is not a proper URL, which means you have to jump through hoops in order to pass it as an argument to Firefox. I do however find it to be a reasonable workaround.

This issue is almost 3 years old and has 11 votes.
Why is nobody working on this ?

As a temporary workaround, the JarDoc plugin is acceptable.
But it would be much more convenient if we could simply jump from the built-in javadoc window to an external browser
(just as it works when configuring a library with an exploded javadoc directory).

Maarteen,

Nobody is working on this because the original question posted on this thread 3 years ago as the first comment to this issue wasn't answered by anyone. You know, not everyone uses Firefox.

I just tried opening a jar:file URL (e.g. jar:file:///c:/junit.jar!/stylesheet.css) using the following browsers (all on Windows XP):

FF3
IE7
Safari 3.1.2
Chrome 0.2.149.30

and it only worked with FF3. However, even if it only works on FF, doesn't it still make sense to fix this bug? Then, rather than not being able to view Javadoc HTML within jars at all, they could at least be viewed when the user's default browser is Firefox.

Nice to have this fixed. Even the first fix for IDEA 9 :)

Any chance of fixing this for 8.x? This is a big problem when using Maven for everything.

+1 for back porting this to IDEA 8.x. Big big problem with Maven libs.
I loved this great Shift+F1 shortcut, and I still miss it!