Several months ago there was an OSNews article which discussed why browsers should be able to display OpenDocument. It’s been a while now and recently Wily Yuen, the reader who submitted this to us, discovered on the OpenOffice.org Wiki that there is indeed somebody working on a Firefox extension called ODFReader, which will display ODF within the browser using XSLT. The extension only reads OOo Writer documents and displays only text so far. You can check it out here.
Firefox prompts what to do, I select “Open with Firefox” and it says it downloaded the .odt file on the desktop, but there’s nothing. I expected Firefox would open it just like an Acrobat file, inside the browser.
I checked, the ODF extention is indeed enable. Dunno…
Well it doesn’t work for me.
It just opens a tab with nothing in it.
Edited 2006-03-22 20:55
“Well it doesn’t work for me. ”
Then I guess the whole project’s worthless, then…
No, of course not. It’s still in very early stage, and I don’t doubt it’s going to be much better. I’m all for an ODF-plugin to browsers.
Thanks god you didn’t try Linux 0.01 and told that to Linus
Some users found that you can only read local ODT files (file://), but cannot read files on remote server (http://).
In my case, I can also read local files only with this extension. It could be a bug in the MIME setting or something.
Works fine here, remote server.
I double-checked it, by choosing firefox (instead of OOo2 Writer) to open *.odt files from remote server. It works! Thanks for the confirmation.
Here, you can try to view some of the ODT files at OpenOffice.org HOWTO documentation page (where certain docs are written in ODT):
http://documentation.openoffice.org/HOW_TO/index.html
I think it would make more sense that installing OpenOffice.org installs a plugin to each browser installed on the system, the same way as Real Player or Acrobat do. Why a plugin only for Firefox?
I am guessing that in the long term, thats the aim of the project. However, at present they are only testing out the plugin thus it would make sense to release the plugin for Firefox as most OO users probably use Firefox as well (more so than IE).
I think it would make more sense that installing OpenOffice.org installs a plugin to each browser installed on the system, the same way as Real Player or Acrobat do.
If I need to view a ODF doc online, I certainly would not want a “plugin” that simply loads OOo Writer into a tab. A small 9 KB Firefox extension aint a bad idea though…
Why a plugin only for Firefox?
Someone has to be the first. If not Mozilla, then who were you expecting?
Just make sure you know the hidden treasure of OOo2 options (hint: enable Mozilla Plugin)
If you have OOo installed, then sure, you can view it.
But a lot of people who don’t have OOo installed but just want to view an ODF document; or for those who are on dial-up, then this small plugin will make their life easier.