Web Archive & HTML Preview

BetterZip 6 previews .webarchive files and .html documents inside an archive using a WebKit-based view. Earlier versions showed only the raw text or a static fallback; the new view loads them as the browser would.

What you get

• Web archives (.webarchive) render with their original styling and embedded resources intact, because the format is self-contained.
• HTML files render as the browser would: text and inline styling appear; text can be selected and copied with ⌘C.
• The web view is a standard WebKit view with default settings: there is no JavaScript sandbox, ad blocker, or URL scheme filter on top.

Caveats

When BetterZip previews a file from inside an archive, it extracts only that file to a temporary cache. Other items in the archive are not extracted alongside it. That has two consequences for HTML preview:

• Relative references from the HTML file to other items inside the same archive (CSS, images, scripts, linked pages) do not resolve, because those siblings are not on disk next to the previewed file.
• Absolute network references (a remote stylesheet, image, or script) will be fetched in the preview, just like in a browser. If that matters for your privacy or trust model, treat untrusted HTML inside an archive the way you’d treat any other downloaded HTML.

If you need a fully resolved render of a small static site, extract the relevant folder first and open index.html in a real browser.

Configuring the default action

What happens when you double-click an HTML or web-archive file is controlled per file type on the Files tab of the settings window. Each rule on that tab has an Open with action and a separate Preview choice. See Settings – Files for the full reference.