Take a look inside Archives without downloading them

Martin Brinkmann
May 21, 2008
Updated • Nov 28, 2012
Firefox, Firefox add-ons
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Have you ever asked yourself if a certain file is inside an archive that has been published on a website? Did you download the archive from that website only to find out that the file was not included ? Worry no more; The Firefox add-on ArchView (thanks Archer for the tip) adds a function to Firefox that makes that process a tad easier.

With ArchView it is possible to take a look at the contents of an archive without downloading the archive completely. Supported are the archive formates rar and zip which should cover most of the archives out there. One interesting feature of ArchView is that it can download files from within an archive which means that you can download the 10K file that you need from that 100 Megabyte archive without downloading the 100 Megabyte.

Archview adds itself to the stats bar and becomes active when the user clicks on a zip or rar link. It displays the contents almost instantly and presents the files of the archive in an XUL or HTML interface.

The author plans to improve the Firefox add-on by supporting additional formats (iso and 7z) in the future.

Update: The latest version of the Firefox add-on supports the ISO CD image format in addition to rar and zip formats. Supported are the protocols HTTP, FTP and file: protocols.

The archive contents are then displayed in the ArchView interface so that you can browse the files inside the archive as if you were browsing the local file system.

To save a file from the archive simply select it in the interface and click on the save button afterwards to save it to your local system. You can alternatively click on view to view the file in the default file viewer, or the sort option to sort files using various data.

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