Preview any file
without downloading it.

No. They are drawn on measured pages at the sheet size and margins the file states, with tables split between their rows and their header repeated. A .docx records no page breaks, only the paper, so lines fall where your browser and your fonts put them. Footnotes, endnotes and text boxes are not carried across.

No. Those are encrypted differently from the file itself and Foretaste carries nothing that can read them. A password-protected archive - ZIP, RAR or 7z - opens fine with a prompt.

No. Values only. No charts, no pivot tables, and formulas are not recalculated.

No. They keep no index to read instead, which is a property of those formats rather than a shortcut. A TAR is at least not held whole: it streams past, and one file inside a plain .tar comes back in a single request.

A few kilobytes. SQLite keeps its schema on its first pages and Parquet keeps its in a footer, so the tables, columns and types of a 500 MB file come out of one range read. Counting rows exactly means walking every table, so it is a button rather than something that happens to you.

Foretaste says which kind of refusal it is and offers to open the page in an ordinary tab, or to save the file through the browser. It does not retry under different headers, read cookies, or try to pass a bot check.

A document, a spreadsheet or an image uses memory in proportion to its size, so Foretaste asks before opening anything over 50 MB. Listing an archive, paging a huge CSV and saving a file out of an archive do not: those stream, and a gigabyte comes out of a 4.8 GB archive without ever sitting in the tab.

Install Foretaste on Chrome, Edge or Firefox. Right-click any file link on any website and choose "Open with Foretaste". The document, spreadsheet or archive is fetched directly into your browser tab and rendered locally, without saving anything to your Downloads folder.

Websites often send a "Content-Disposition: attachment" header or serve files with MIME types your browser cannot display natively. When you click those links, Chrome or Firefox starts an automatic download. Foretaste intercepts the file link directly, reading and displaying the content in your browser tab without triggering a download.

Yes. Most online file viewers require uploading your document to their cloud servers. Foretaste has no file-processing server: every parser runs locally on your computer inside the browser extension. No file, filename or URL is ever uploaded anywhere.

Foretaste uses HTTP range requests to fetch only the central directory index from the end of the ZIP archive—typically just 67 KB even for a large 40 MB archive. You can inspect every file name and folder immediately, and even extract individual files without downloading the rest.

Yes. Foretaste opens DOCX documents on measured pages, displays XLSX workbooks and CSV files in paginated grids, and renders large PDFs page-by-page. You do not need Microsoft Office, Excel or Adobe Acrobat installed.