Ask Slashdot: Why don't browsers honor "SMB://" URIs?

DraugTheWhopper writes: One thing that (I think) irks many tech people is the lack of ubiquity for handling common protocols. For example: a small college campus maintains an intranet website, and wishes to provide its non-tech-savvy students with easy links to files on an NFS or SMB share. It seems there is no elegant solution to allow a hyperlink to open a network address in the appropriate file manager. From my perspective, it doesn't seem any harder than having the web browser pass the URI to the OS, or if the OS isn't capable of handling it, to translate it first (smb://Server/Share to \\Server\Share). I thought the whole point of the URI system is to allow simple accessing of resources? And to all those who cry "But SECURITY!", keep in mind that custom URI scheme names are already being used, e.g., the new LogMeIn client program registers the "logmein://" protocol in Windows, and Chrome passes it without incident after an unobtrusive confirmation checkbox.