How to Open Webarchive Files on Windows

I got an email with an attachment in webarchive extension. When I tried to open it on a Windows computer, I first used Word, but Word could not open it. Renaming the extension to the popular formats like .doc or .pdf did not help either.

Wikipedia has an article about webarchive. The format is supported by Safari browser. Every mac has Safari browser built in. If you use a Windows machine, you have to download and install the Safari browser from Apple. Note that only version 4 beta (or above) supports webarchive format.

http://www.apple.com/safari/download/

Try it and let us know if it works for you.


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15 Comments

  1. I changed the .Webarchive portion and retyped .doc. Then used Word 2003 (with compatibility pack for the 2007 Office system) gave me a message that a CSS style sheet is missing, but at least I got some content of the file.

  2. 1. Open the file using Windows Word Pad
    (Start –> All Programs –> Accessories –> WordPad)
    2. Cut all data from near the top to near the bottom
    3. Paste it into a new file called document.html
    4. At the top add
    5. Save the file and Exit Wordpad
    6. Now open in Internet Explorer

  3. “title” and “/html” should be enclosed with less than and greater than symbols

    with less than on left and greater on the right

  4. I’ll get it eventually.

    1. Open the file using Windows Word Pad
    (Start –> All Programs –> Accessories –> WordPad)
    2. Cut all data from -&lt lttitle -&gt near the top to -</html -> near the bottom
    3. Paste it into a new file called document.html
    4. At the top add
    5. Save the file and Exit Wordpad
    6. Now open in Internet Explorer

  5. Thank you – you went to a lot of trouble to detail this process. It worked. I couldn’t figure out how to save the document as an html document using Wordpad, so, I pasted the selected data into a Word document and saved that as a Web Page. That worked. Then, I tried using Internet Explorer to open the Wordpad document which was just saved as a Wordpad document. That worked, too.

  6. Safari on Windows may work for some .webarchive files, but not all. I was just sent one that started to display in Safari on Windows, then changed its mind and displayed a message that said it could only be displayed with Safari on the Mac. It also said that it could be opened with recent versions of Firefox and Chrome. Again, no luck. I’ll try the latest IE and Adam’s method, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the particular file I was send has some Mac-only content.

  7. Now I’ve tried IE9 and IE10 with no luck. Adam’s fix seemed almost impossible to apply, and I give up trying to figure out where to add the html header. The file I’m trying to display is more than 50K lines (some individual lines wrap for more than a screen!) of javascript! No luck for me, but it sounds like the simpler files work fine.

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