Open in Browser

A browser extension that offers the ability to open files directly in the browser instead of downloading them. You can also change the MIME-type if you wish, and choose to remember the preferred action per file-type.

Screenshot

All screenshots

Installation

Install the extension from: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/open-in-browser/

Firefox

Development: Visit about:debugging and load the extension/ directory.

Chrome

The extension does not work in Chromium-based browsers such as Chrome or Opera because the webRequest API does not support non-blocking asynchronous return values.

Development

• The extension can directly be loaded from the extension/ directory.
• The extension extracts the icons, translations and MIME-mappings from external sources. These can be generated using the gen-*.js files at the top of the repository.
• To test whether the extension works, run npm run-script test-server (set the PORT environment variable if the default port is in use) and open the displayed URL in the browser.

History

The main inspiration is https://github.com/spasche/openinbrowser

This project was written in 2013, in an attempt to port the functionality of the Open in Browser Firefox add-on to Chrome. However, it was never published because the only way to ask the user for a decision is to use the blocking window.showModalDialog API. But this resulted in a terrible user experience because the browser would suspend all requests until the extension had returned.

In 2017, the project was revived, this time to port the functionality to Firefox, where extensions have to be written using the WebExtensions API - similar to Chrome's extension API. Contrary to Chrome, Firefox's webRequest API allows extension to suspend network requests in a non-blocking way, so it is feasible to show a non-blocking dialog to ask for input.