Look in Archived Files with Firefox Addon ArchView

By Josh | May 21, 2008

Ever wonder what an archived file contains before you download it? Sometimes this would be good for making sure that the file contains what you are looking for. ArchView, an addon for Firefox, allows you to take a look at the contents of an archived file before downloading it.

A couple of nice features about ArchView are that it allows you to open or save an individual file. That way, if the archive contains a lot of other files that you don’t want, you can just download the files that you do want. You could also view the files in the browser by right clicking it and opening the file. That way, you can determine if it is correct before you download it.

Right now ArchView works with zip and rar type files. The interface can be changed to be XUL or HTML. The XUL interface, which is the default, is much more advanced than the HTML interface. The developer also plans to include 7-Zip support and ISO support in the future.

In order to install the addon in anything higher than Firefox 3 Beta 4, you’ll have to download it from the developer’s site. It is working fine for me. Although, I did have some trouble when trying to view archived files on the Wordpress plugin page. They didn’t seem to work with ArchView. Other than that, it seems like a nice addon, and I’ll be looking forward to updates in the future.

Via Ghacks.