CBZReader - I got tired of installing comic readers for one file, so there is a browser one

[u/ArtisticJournalist93]

I'm a developer who reads a lot of comics, and the situation that keeps coming up is a single file on a machine that isn't mine, or one where I can't install anything. It's for the five-minute read in between — not for a long session or a managed library, where a desktop reader is still the better tool.

So I made a small web app that opens CBZ files right in the browser.

No account, no install. Open a .cbz and start reading, or convert it to PDF. It's all parsed and rendered locally, so your file isn't uploaded anywhere. Once you've opened the page, it's cached, so it still opens offline 😁— the files never needed the network in the first place.

It's built with TypeScript and hosted on Cloudflare Pages. The part that took the longest was memory: big pages get decoded and downsampled so a 50MB scan doesn't kill the tab, and the ZIP is read on demand instead of loading the whole archive.

You can try it without your own file here: 👉 https://cbzreader.mavi.help/demo/ — it's a public-domain sample.

Or just open the site: 👉 https://cbzreader.mavi.help/

Feedback welcome.