So you have found that interesting pdf document, Excel spreadsheet or Word document that you would like to view right away. Only problem is that the computer you are working on right now is not supporting the format outright, or maybe it is a new computer and you have not had time to install all the programs that you need to view those documents.

What if I’d tell you that you can open documents in Firefox or Google Chrome right away without the need for plugins or third party software installed on your system?

The Docs Online Viewer userscript comes to the rescue. It is a free browser add-on that Chrome users can install right away. Firefox users need to install the excellent Greasemonkey extension first before they can do the same. Afterwards, it works exactly the same in both browsers.

Once installed, it will automatically add icons in front of every link pointing directly to a document format that it supports. As you can see below on the screenshot, all you need to do to open the document online, is to click on that link to do so.

A click on the regular link on the other hand downloads the documents to the computer instead, which is the default behavior in this case.

Supported document formats:

As you can see, all important formats are supported by the script. Once you have it installed, you can open all these supported formats right in your web browser of choice. The services used are Google Docs, Google’s popular document management service, and Zoho, another popular document service on the Internet.