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 4.1.0

Kiwix JS v4.1.0

Released on *2024-07-15*

* FEATURE: Preview a WikiMedia ZIM article in a popover by hovering, long-pressing, or tabbing into a link
* FEATURE: Automatically re-open the last selected archive in Chromium browsers > 122
* FEATURE: New security dialogue box when opening untrusted ZIMs now shows enhanced ZIM metadata
* ENHANCEMENT: Display active content warning when opening PhET ZIMs in Restricted mode
* ENHANCEMENT: Added option to turn off external link warning
* INFO: Translated Kiwix JS extension entries in Edge and Chrome Stores to Spanish and French
* UPDATE: JQuery mode is now renamed to Restricted mode to better indicate its effect
* UPDATE: JQuery is now fully removed from all first-party code
* UPDATE: Simplify active content warning for clarity and impact
* UPDATE: Allow more time for caching assets before rebooting if SW registration stalls
* FIX: Various issues with enumarating the contents of picked folders
* FIX: Bug with empty search box on initial ZIM load
* FIX: Bug which caused app to reload when accidentally dragging images or links in articles
* FIX: Non-supported URI schemata (protocols) now open outside the sandbox
* FIX: Avoid accidentally opening the first ZIM archive in a picked directory of archives
* FIX: Several typos
* WORKAROUND: Overencoded querystrings in Zimit2 external links are now decoded
* DEV: Add i18n for extension manifests so that Add-on Store entries can be translated
* DEV: Change method for patching gitignore when adding NPM dependencies
* DEV: Some code reorganization
* DEPENDENCIES: Updates to follow-redirects, vite, braces, ws

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