JohnDas FunDas & Ideas

Files with a “.cbr” extension are basically a compressed set of JPG, PNG, or GIF images.
You can open them with the freeware program CDisplay (a comic book reader software).

Available here: http://www.geocities.com/davidayton/CDisplay.html

You can open .cbr files with WinRar (they are just .rar files with the file extension changed)
And .cbz files can be opened even with Windows XP’s default Compressed folder software (rename all .cbz files to .zip files and all .cbr files to .rar files)

Here is a list of free software that can be used to open .cbr files and .cbz files

Windows:

* CDisplay, the Windows Sequential Image Viewer for Windows by David Dayton.
Available here: http://www.geocities.com/davidayton/CDisplay.html

* pixelComic, a skinnable comic book viewer written in C++.
Available here: http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/pixelComic/1058250114/1

* CBViewer
Available here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cbviewer

Linux:

* cbrPager: a simple comic pager for Linux (using GTK+)
Available here: http://www.jcoppens.com/soft/cbrpager/index.en.php

* QComicBook (using Qt)
Available here: http://freshmeat.net/projects/qcomicbook/

* Comical, the UNIX, Linux and MacOS X Sequential Image Viewer (using wxWidgets)
Available here: http://www.sketchyorigins.com/comics/forumdisplay.php?f=47

* PyComicsViewer, for Linux and Windows
Available here: http://borco.net/html/PyComicsViewer/

* CBView, written in GTK2-perl
Available here: http://elvine.org/code/cbview/

* Asparagino’s Comic Viewer
Available here: http://home.asparagine.net/software/comicviewer/

Mac OSX:

* FFView
Available here: http://www.feedface.com/projects/ffview.html

* Comic Book Viewer
Available here: http://gumby.misplacedmac.com/

* Jomic (written in Java, so should be cross-platform as well)
Availabe here: http://jomic.sourceforge.net/

These are free software image viewing programs designed specifically for reading digital comic book files, particularly those in .cbr and .cbz formats (and .rar and .zip formats, if they haven’t had their file extensions changed to .cbr and .cbz yet).