About this extension

Kiwix is an offline wikipedia viewer. See the official site: https://kiwix.org/

You need to download an archive (ZIM file) from https://download.kiwix.org/zim/, store it in on your device, and manually select it after starting the extension.

You can search among the article titles, and read any of them without any Internet access.
All the content of wikipedia is inside your device (including the images).
It might also works with other content in the OpenZIM format: https://wiki.openzim.org/wiki/OpenZIM , but has been only tested on the wikipedia and stackexchange ones.

If your Internet access is expensive/rare/slow/unreliable/watched/censored, you still can browse this amazing amount of knowledge and culture.

Developer comments

Firefox unfortunately disables ServiceWorkers in WebExtensions. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1344561
This prevents us from using the standard way to read ZIM content.

There are 2 workarounds:

the recommended way is to use ServiceWorker mode through a Progressive Webapp (which requires a one-time Internet access). It's automatically done when you choose the ServiceWorker mode
use the legacy jQuery mode (which does not work on all contents)

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Release notes for 4.0.0

Kiwix JS v4.0.0

Released on *2024-02-22*

* FEATURE: High-fidelity Zinit archive reading, with fallback to static content for old browsers
* FEATURE: Added preliminary support for forthcoming Zimit 2.0 archive types
* FEATURE: Enabled multi-ZIM support (browsing different ZIMs simultaneously in different browser tabs or windows)
* FEATURE: Added a security warning on opening a ZIM for the first time with fallback to Secure Mode (aka JQuery)
* ENHANCEMENT: Support most Zimit (1/2) archives in jQuery mode if they have largely static content
* ENHANCEMENT: Better UX for dealing with unsupported Zimit archives, and auto fallback
* ENHANCEMENT: Added an active content warning when opening a Zimit 2 archive in ServiceWorkerLocal mode
* UPDATE: Better detection for opening PDFs and external links outside the sandbox
* KNOWN ISSUE: Dark mode inverts images in Zimit-based archives
* BUGFIX: Restored ability to scroll the search results with touch or mouse
* BUGFIX: Issue causing a bootloop in rare circumstances when the app is in JQuery mode
* FIX: Failure to handle PDFs in some OpenZIM archive types
* FIX: Opening of new tabs in Zimit-based archives
* FIX: Updated some broken links
* FIX: Added support for srcsets when reading a Zimit archive in JQuery mode
* WORKAROUND: Provide alternative zimit2 link handling for browsers that do not support wombat.js
* DEV: Added low-level support for zimit2, add added zimType to ZIMArchive properties shown in console
* DEV: Added possibility of using libzim for reading OpenZIM file contents (see Expert Settings)
* DEV: Provided a separate webmanifest for the PWA version
* DEV: Updated info for developers
* DEV: Added a generic version of browserAction in backgroundscript to support MV3 extensions
* DEV: Fixed some anomalies in tests
* DEV: Ensured consistent use of settingsStore prefix with localStorage keys
* DEV: Updated rollup-js to v4
* DEV: Updated libzim to v0.6
* DEV: Updated vite-js to v4.5.2
* DEV: Bumped GitHub actions/checkout@v3 to actions/checkout@v4

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