tar-web is patched version of tar-stream that runs in a web browser. The original project https://github.com/mafintosh/tar-stream provides a streaming tar parser and generator and nothing else. It operates purely using streams which means you can easily extract/parse tarballs without ever hitting the file system.
Note that you still need to gunzip your data if you have a .tar.gz. We recommend using gunzip-maybe in conjunction with this.
npm install tar-web
Original tar-stream Documantation: https://github.com/mafintosh/tar-stream/
MIT