Browse inside a WordPress installation

I need to have a look inside a competitor's WordPress website, nothing bad I just need to know what plugins they use.

I am not an UNIX expert. I can browse the folder wp-includes, I can see a list of files and directories.

But with any other folder, such as wp-content and sub-folders, I only get blank screens in Firefox.

I bet the answer is no, but anyone knows of any way to achieve this...?

You will get the blank screen in every browser because the folder has an empty index.html file in it.
In the past a regular WP install left many directories open for browsing. It required manual work to seal your important directories by adding the index.html yourself.

Don't know from what version...but Wordpress added the empty index.html files to the install.

Just view source and you can see the full path to the css and other files... it will be something like sitename.com/wp-content/themes/themename....

It's not exactly browsing, but this is how I get the name of the theme.

edit: just realized you were looking for plugins, not themes... i should probably sleep every so often

Actually it is WP's default behavior... my own WP sites too only show the wp-includes folder while the other folders also come out blank, yet I did not save any index.html into them.

If you have a technical bent and know what plugins you are testing for, there is a very simple way to check - you can do this manually and check the response headers, or you write a short script (I have recently switched from doing the in PHP to doing this using jQuery in the browser).

1. Identify the plugin(s) you want to test for.
2. Either unzip or install the plugins and note the directory name they create.
3. Test for this plugin by checking the full path, for example: WEBSITE/wp-content/plugins/akismet/

If the plugin is installed, you will typically get either a 403 (no index page) or a 200 (blank index page) as the response (try checking live http headers plugin for firefox if doing this manually).

If the plugin is NOT installed you get a 404 - even the default 404 page. So if you know what animal you are hunting . . . .

I've created a targeted list in the past of about 20 plugins - also checking for variations on readme.txt, etc to not only check for plugins but for plugin versions. I find it useful when approaching someone about updating/modifying/tuning their WP site.

Finally, some plugins add in their own CSS files - this is a giveaway if the fault wordpress plugin directory has moved.

So far the best I could do was to download the entire site with one of those free web downloaders. Not very elegant but it actually worked, although a few folders do not make much sense.