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Firefox Local Mode: Goodbye, localhost?
Real HTTPS for local files, no server needed. One catch.
Double-click an index.html on your machine and a lot of the web stops working.
The service worker won’t register, and the fetch() for the JSON file sitting right next to it fails.
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So you do the usual thing and start a server. Firefox Local Mode, new in Firefox 153, is the first thing I’ve seen that makes that step optional.
Why I keep a terminal open for a folder of static files
My reflex here is npx serve.
Inside a real project it’s the Vite dev server, and for a quick HTML experiment I’ll sometimes just click “Go Live” in VS Code’s Live Server extension.
npx serve .
# Or use live serverNone of these are hard. It’s just a bit silly that showing a folder of static files in a browser needs a running process, a port, and one more terminal tab I’ll forget to close.
Here’s a real-world example:
Imagine you’re testing a small product page with an index.html, a products.json file, and some JavaScript that loads the product details.
