Open It Online is a Firefox extensions that is compatible with Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 and offering the user a way to open and edit documents directly online. The benefit of this approach is that the user does not need specific tools installed to view and edit the files on his computer, all he needs is Firefox and that extension.
The add-on can currently load most Office file types including doc, xls, ppt but also sxw, csv, rtd and several image formats. Don’t worry, it does not install an Office suite as a Firefox add-on. It makes use of various online services that can display and edit the aforementioned file types.
The add-on displays a configuration dialog after installation that allows the user to pick one out of four services for each file type. The default service for every file type is the Zoho Viewer which can be changed to Zoho Writer, Google Docs and Thinkfree Viewer.
The add-on is basically redirecting the file download to one of the online services so that it can be viewed and edited there. That’s definitely a clever concept.
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This is an awesome find! Nice work! I’m definitely giving this a shot!
This reminds me of a service (and addon) I used to love, before it disappeared: DocuFarm. ( via: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/05/preview-documents-with-docufarm.html )
It hosted the files (pdf, doc, etc) on their server, and then displayed them and searchable images within your browser. It was AWESOME, and I miss it! Sadly, it went down rather suddenly and has not been heard from since. Has ANYONE heard anything about it since then??? Please help, I’d love to hear it’s on its way back!