Browse web pages from zip files directly

Fox Doc is a Firefox extension developed by Emanuel Ruffaldi that will let you access HTML documents stored in zip files in your computer. This proves to be a convenient trick particularly for browsing manuals and documentation you may have downloaded or created yourself.

Once installed, select the Fox Doc sidebar in the View menu. Then browse for the zip file, double-click it and Fox Doc will open index.html and if not present, the first HTML file it finds inside. You can then browse among other HTML documents as you would do with unarchived files.

In the background, Fox Doc actually creates a tiny HTML file that calls your ZIP file using Firefox’s internal jar pseudo-protocol.

The interface is somewhat clunky though. It seems more reasonable to access ZIP files from Firefox’s File/Open menu instead of browsing from a sidebar which would be of more use if it showed the zip file contents. Anyway it gets the job done and should prove its usefulness very fast to frequent manual readers.

Get Fox Doc at Mozilla Add-ons.

Usefulness: 4/5 – Usability: 3/5 – Features: 3/5