In this section, I’ll give some information about free online doc previews, unfortunately, there are only two and none of them is perfect, but they greatly expand the possibilities. Mozilla shows a message informing the user that a plugin is needed.Chrome on iOS is doing the same as above, but on Android, it gives an option to choose any installed app on the device to open that file.Safari browser shows a message about no inline pdf support and gives a download button.It’s a browser-native feature so it’s the fastest solution from all the methods mentioned in this article.It works on all popular desktop browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Edge, IE8+.

No file size limitations, even large files like 300MB pdf will show up, of course, it will take ages to load but still.

How to use it?Īdd inline embedder element on your website and in src attribute pass it a direct URL to your file.

Inline embedders are:, and, their way of working is pretty much the same, they’ve got slight differences which are not significant for us at this moment. If you want to preview your file, all you need is direct the URL to the file, but how can you know that you have a direct URL? For most cases, pasting it in your browser will automatically force a download process (except pdf’s, most likely they’ll open up in your browser window). What do I mean by file preview? I mean viewing a file on a website, the same way as on a desktop, within a dedicated app. with no specific information about the problems that both of these solutions have. Looking it up on Google will most likely lead you to use Google docs viewer or inline HTML file embedding eg. File preview seems to be a common thing, so many developers might think that asking Google How to preview Word document in browser? would be enough to find a perfect solution for their project, because how such a popular thing like file preview can be so hard to achieve?

How to view cdf files