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I'm frequently opening files from websites (e.g. doc files) and is seems Chrome is missing the option to open it directly instead of saving it first (like possible in e.g. IE, FF, Opera). Any hack around?

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  • I suppose Chrome skipped this feature for security reasons, however at least let me decide about it
    – robi
    Feb 3, 2011 at 7:07
  • What do you mean by "open it directly?" Do you want to open files from your desktop (or local filesystem), instead of opening them from the Web?
    – Anderson Green
    Aug 28, 2012 at 23:58
  • If it helps at all, you can express your wish about the missing feature on this issue: code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=68200 and star it to get updates
    – Costin Gușă
    Jan 11, 2015 at 3:31

2 Answers 2

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At present Chrome will only download the file - it won't give you the option to Open or Save that other browsers give you.

You can set files with certain file extension to open automatically after the download has completed.

Taken from this Google Chrome FAQ article

If you want certain types of files to always open after they're done downloading, click the arrow next to the file button in the downloads bar and select Always open files of this type. To prevent potentially malicious files from automatically downloading to your computer, this option isn't available for executable filetypes, such as those with .exe, .dll, or .bat extensions (for Windows), and .dmg extensions (for Mac

There is also a Chrome extension that previews some file types (PDF, Presentations etc) in the Google Docs Viewer. This can be found here.

Looking through some of the Google Chrome forums this feature has been requested numerous times since 2008 - the standard response of "we are working on it" has been always been the reply from Google.

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  • Thanks. The extension you mentioned, and others, seems rather poor. Most of the times I'm opening attachments from gmail and the functionality to watch them id docs is already built in. This leads me the the thought that Google are lazy with this feature as part of their war with MS Ofiice. Well I might have to write this extension myself.
    – robi
    Feb 3, 2011 at 9:13
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Open files in Chrome → press keys: Crtl + O and saving files → press keys: Ctrl + S

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