The ZIP Archive Explorer lets you open a .zip file directly in your browser and look inside it without installing anything or uploading the archive anywhere. Drop in an archive and you immediately get a full folder tree, the uncompressed size of every file, the total compression ratio, inline previews of text and images, and one-click extraction of individual files. It is built for developers inspecting a build output, designers checking the assets in an exported bundle, support staff verifying what a customer actually sent, and anyone who just needs to peek inside a zip before committing to extracting the whole thing.
Most operating systems force you to fully extract a zip to a temporary folder before you can see what is in it, which is slow and clutters your disk. This tool reads the archive’s central directory instantly, so even a large archive lists in a fraction of a second, and you only ever decompress the specific file you click. Because everything runs as client-side JavaScript, the archive’s bytes never leave your machine — there is no server, no account, and no privacy trade-off.
How it works
When you select a file, the explorer loads it into memory and parses the ZIP central directory using the JSZip library. Each entry exposes its path, modification date, uncompressed size, and the compressed size stored on disk, which together let the tool show you exactly how much space the archive is saving. Folders are reconstructed into a navigable tree; files are tagged as text, image, or binary based on their extension. Clicking a text file decompresses just that entry to a UTF-8 string and renders it in a scrollable code pane; clicking an image decompresses it to a Blob and shows it as a picture. Extraction uses the same per-entry decompression and triggers a normal browser download, so you never have to unpack the entire archive.
Example
Suppose you download a project-build.zip and want to confirm it contains a dist/index.html and check the bundled dist/assets/app.css. Open the archive, expand the dist folder, and you will see both files with their sizes — say index.html at 4 KB and app.css at 38 KB. Click app.css to read the minified CSS inline, scan it for the class you expected, then click the download arrow to pull just that one file onto your desktop. The other 200 files in the archive are never decompressed, so the whole check takes seconds.
| Action | What you see |
|---|---|
| Open archive | File count, folder count, total size, compression ratio |
| Expand folder | Nested files with per-file sizes |
Filter assets | Flat list of every path containing “assets” |
| Click a text file | Inline, scrollable preview of its contents |
| Click download arrow | That single file saved to your device |
Everything happens locally in your browser — the archive is never uploaded, stored, or shared.