ZIP Extractor
Look inside the archive first. Then take the one file you came for, not all four hundred.
Drop a ZIP here
Only the index is read to browse it. Nothing is uploaded.
Click a folder to open it. Click a file to extract just that file.
- Files
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- Unpacked
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- Compression
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Password-protected entries are named, not opened
If an entry is encrypted, its row says so. Modern AES-protected archives were protected on purpose, and typing that password into a web page is a habit worth not forming — use your operating system's extractor or 7-Zip for those.
Everything here runs on your device. Nothing you enter is uploaded or stored.
Drop a ZIP in and browse it like a folder. Click one file to pull just that file out, or take a whole folder in a single download. The archive stays on your device the entire time — nothing is uploaded, which is the difference between this and every extractor that asks you to wait for a progress bar.
How to use it
Drop the archive on the panel. The folder tree appears immediately, with each row showing the real uncompressed size and, for folders, how many files are inside. Click a folder to open it and the breadcrumb trail to come back. Clicking a file extracts and saves just that one, previewing it first if it is an image or a small text file. The Extract folder button takes everything below wherever you are standing.
Browsing is instant, even for a huge archive
Every ZIP has an index at the end called the central directory, listing every entry with its name, size and location. This tool reads only that, which is a few kilobytes even for an archive of thousands of files. That is why the tree appears the moment you drop the file, and why nothing is decompressed until you actually click something.
Reading the central directory rather than scanning for local headers also gets the sizes right. An entry written by a streaming compressor stores zeroes in its local header and the real figures only in the index — a tool that reads local headers reports a folder full of 0-byte files.
Sizes shown are the real sizes
The number on each row is the uncompressed size: what the file will be when you extract it. The compression ratio for the archive as a whole is shown separately. This matters because the two can be wildly different — a 4 MB ZIP of CSV exports might hold 60 MB of data, and knowing that before you extract is the point of looking first.
Names are decoded properly
Filenames in a ZIP have no guaranteed character encoding. There is a flag that is supposed to declare UTF-8, and a large number of writers set UTF-8 bytes without ever setting the flag. Trusting the flag is how you get an archive full of names like résumé.pdf. This tool decodes as UTF-8 regardless of what the flag claims and only falls back to the legacy single-byte encoding when the bytes are genuinely not valid UTF-8, which is strictly more accurate than believing the metadata.
What it does not do
No passwords, for the reasons in the FAQ above. No RAR, 7z or TAR — each is a different format needing its own parser, and ZIP is what the overwhelming majority of files people are handed actually are. No editing inside the archive: adding a file to an existing ZIP means rewriting it, and ZIP Creator is the honest way to do that. No nested extraction in one step — pull the inner ZIP out, then drop it back in, which takes two clicks and keeps the memory cost predictable.
Nothing is written anywhere except your downloads folder, and only when you click. Dropping an archive in to look at it leaves no trace at all.
Which tool for which job
| You want to | Use |
|---|---|
| Look inside a ZIP, take one file | ZIP Extractor |
| Bundle files into a ZIP | ZIP Creator |
| Read a CSV you just pulled out | CSV Viewer |
| Identify a file with no extension | File Metadata Viewer |
| Split a file too big to send | File Splitter |
Questions
Can it open password-protected archives?
No, and it tells you which entries are protected rather than pretending they are missing. Encrypted ZIPs use one of two schemes. The old one, ZipCrypto, is cryptographically broken and can be cracked, but implementing an attack is not what a file utility should be. The modern one, AES-256, is sound and would need the password plus a key-derivation step — a browser page can technically do that, but archives protected this way are usually protected deliberately, and a tool that invites you to type the password into a web page is teaching a bad habit even when the page is honest. Use 7-Zip or your operating system's built-in extractor for those.
Why can it not read some entries?
Because ZIP is a container format that permits several compression methods, and only two of them are readable without shipping a decompressor. Stored and DEFLATE together cover the overwhelming majority of archives in the wild, and both are handled natively by your browser. LZMA, bzip2, zstd, PPMd and XZ appear occasionally — usually from 7-Zip with non-default settings — and each would need a large WebAssembly module to support. Rather than fail vaguely, the tool names the method on the row so you know exactly what your archive contains and which desktop tool will open it.
How does it handle very large archives?
The archive is read into memory, so a few hundred megabytes is comfortable on a desktop and less on a phone. Browsing costs almost nothing regardless of size, because only the central directory is parsed — that is the index at the end of every ZIP, and reading it is why the folder tree appears instantly even for an archive with thousands of entries. Extraction is per-entry, so pulling one 2 MB file out of a 3 GB archive is fast.
What is Zip Slip and why does it matter here?
It is a class of vulnerability where an archive contains an entry named something like ../../etc/passwd, so a careless extractor writes outside the folder you chose and overwrites a system file. It has affected real extractors in many languages. A browser download cannot escape your downloads folder, so the risk here is structurally very low, but every extracted filename is still flattened to its last path segment and stripped of leading dots and Windows-illegal characters. It costs nothing and it is the correct default.
Why does Extract folder give me another ZIP?
Because browsers block bursts of downloads. Trigger forty saves in a row and Chrome treats everything after the first as an unwanted popup, so you would ask for forty files and silently receive one. Re-packing into a single archive is the only reliable way to deliver a whole folder from a web page. The re-packed archive is stored rather than compressed, since the contents just came out of a compressor and there is nothing left to squeeze.
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