Preview files before downloading - Foretaste

See inside documents, spreadsheets, ZIP archives and data files before downloading. Read in your browser, and nothing is uploaded.

See what is inside a file before you download it. Most preview tools need the file on your machine first. Foretaste reads it where it already is. You are reading a page and there is a link on it - a report, a spreadsheet, a 41 MB bundle of course materials. You do not want it yet. You want to know what is in it. Right-click the link, choose "Open with Foretaste", and it opens in a clean tab. WHAT IT OPENS Documents and slide decks, including PDF, Word and their OpenDocument equivalents, and books. A Word document is laid out on its own paper: numbered pages at the sheet size and margins the file itself states, with a long table split between its rows and its header repeated at the top of each new page. A deck is drawn as slides, in the theme's own colours and on its own background, rather than transcribed as text. Spreadsheets and data, including Excel workbooks with every sheet as a tab, comma-separated tables turned two hundred rows at a time, SQLite databases and Parquet datasets. Archives, including ZIP, 7z, RAR, tar and the compressed forms of it, and archives inside archives. A password-protected one asks for the password once, in the tab, and it never leaves. Pictures, audio and video, drawn or played by the browser itself. A HEIC photo can also be saved as an ordinary JPG. And the rest: fonts shown in their own typeface, subtitles, calendar invitations and contact cards. Every format Foretaste opens, with the limits of each one written down, is at https://foretaste.page/formats. It says where a format stops instead of promising "and many more". EVERY FILE ON A PAGE, LISTED Right-click the page rather than a link and choose "Find files on this page". Foretaste lists every file that page links to, grouped by kind, and opens any one of them in the same reader. It is the opposite of a bulk downloader: nothing is fetched until you press something, and a page of forty attachments costs nothing to look through. https://foretaste.page/find-files-on-a-page OPENING A ZIP WITHOUT DOWNLOADING IT A ZIP keeps its index at the end. If the server allows range requests, Foretaste reads just that index and lists the whole archive without transferring it. Measured against a local server that logs every request: a 41 MB archive listed after reading 66 KB of it - 0.16%, in four requests. Below about 100 KB the trick stops being worth the round trips, so Foretaste simply takes the file and says so. The number on screen is counted as the bytes arrive, not copied from this description. YOUR FILES STAY WITH YOU Files are read inside the browser tab. There is no server that receives them, because there is no file-processing server at all: nothing you open, no filename and no page address is ever sent anywhere. The extension contains no analytics and no trackers of any kind. (The website at foretaste.page is a separate thing and does use Google Analytics, which its privacy page says in full. It cannot see anything you open.) The only request Foretaste makes on its own behalf is a once-a-day licence check, and only for someone on a monthly or yearly plan. It carries a licence number and nothing else. People on the free plan, and people who bought a lifetime key, make no such request at all. This is checked by the build rather than promised in a description: a script fails the release if any code in the extension can talk to anything but the address you asked for. FREE, AND PRO Every format is free. Previewing a document, the archive tree and its search, finding everything linked from a page, saving to disk and English text recognition are all free and stay free. So is filtering a log by level: a row of buttons carrying the count of each, so the four errors in a long build log are one press away instead of a scroll. Pro adds depth on top: browsing the rows of a SQLite database, statistics out of a Parquet footer, comparing two documents or two archives line by line, pulling every picture out of a report, searching the text inside an archive without unpacking it, and narrowing a table to the rows that match. The full list is at https://foretaste.page/pricing. Nothing that worked before is behind it. Pro also collects. Pick a field and get every value of it across a whole document, as a list with how often each appeared, saved as a spreadsheet. The document writes the menu: XML offers its own tags, JSON its own keys, a log its own fields, a CSV its own columns. Read as it streams, so a 5 GB log costs no memory. PERMISSIONS Your browser asks for access to websites once, when you install Foretaste, and grants it there. It is one permission rather than one per site because a download is routinely served from a different address than the page it was linked on - an archive sends each file to whichever server holds it - so being asked per site would mean being asked forever, about hostnames you have never seen. Your browser's extension settings are where you narrow or withdraw it; Foretaste has a per-site off switch of its own, and a master switch that stops it running at all. Access is what lets Foretaste fetch a file on your behalf. It is not a channel out: the bytes are read on your machine and no file, file name or page address is ever sent anywhere. - Right-click menu: to add "Open with Foretaste" to a link. - Downloads: to save what you are looking at, or one entry out of an archive, to your disk. This needs no site access, which is why saving works even where reading does not. - Storage: to keep your settings on your own machine. - Scripting: to draw the small button beside a link, and to read the link addresses on a page when you ask it to scan one. - Active tab: so the toolbar popup can tell which site you are on and offer to allow that one. Granted only while you have Foretaste's own icon open, and gone the moment you navigate. Website: https://foretaste.page Privacy: https://foretaste.page/privacy Support: https://foretaste.page/support - or hello@foretaste.page