NewInstance

A thing I usually do with firefox is to read documentation. Usually also BIG documentation. An example of that is the JDK javadocs or other libraries documentation. I think that this is quite common to any kind of developer.
So a thing that I would like that any browser to do is the ability to serve html from inside a standard archive, such as a tar.gz/jar/zip/rar/7z file… I don’t think it would be difficult to do.

Actually I am using eclipse help server to do that (Preferences->Help->Help Server): Eclipse (3.2M4) uses an internal web server to read from a zip file and serve its content: I fixed the port (that by default is get randomly), so, after I started eclipse and pressed CTRL+F1, the help server is available and accessible thru firefox using an url like this: http://127.0.0.1:6789/help/nftopic/jar:file:/usr/lib/j2sdk1.4-sun/doc.zip!/docs/api/index.html. This is just a workaround that prevents you to unpack a >30MB zip file to read its content. You see that in the URL the file path is an absolute path, so you can access any zip file content in the filesystem without unpacking it.

But… I think that this should be a feature of (an intelligent) web browser. Web browsers are not only useful for online content today ;-)

For more discussion in this topic, see also: Starting Eclipse Help Server w/o launching Eclipse