Mozilla Archive Format, with MHT and Faithful Save

Rated 5 out of 5 stars

by Firefox user 8a0582 on June 10, 2018 · permalink

This plugin (v4.1.4) accurately saves a webpage, doesn't matter how complex- expanded Youtube comments are still expanded when reopened, same with expanded contents on Facebook. And the rendering is exactly how it looked, much like a grabber that saves to bmp (Screengrab fix ver) except you can copy/paste text, urls, etc. The original URL is saved too and shows up as a link at the top. The MAFF can be extracted with 7zip to examine the contents in detail.

That this is not supported at all anymore is an outrage (even read only would help). Mozilla Archive Format. Archive- as in forever available.

Going forward, I have tried Save Page (WE) for saving new pages. It is garbage. Very slow loading, script error messages, images (most/all) not displaying. Pages rendered differently than the original. Useless.

I tried manually converting a few MAFFs. No success. I tried auto-converting MAFFs (I have about 17 million, many created via automation of FIrefox via FF.au3) with FF v56 + MAFF 5.2.1 converter. Didn't work. Files either don't load (or load properly) or are skipped or some other error (0 byte html files).

So I'm hoping my XP boxes continue to to work with v52 ESR after 9/5/2018 (the drop dead date). My Linux Mint VM has FIrefox that I manually make some MAFFs with. It has FF 53. And no autoupdater. I'm hoping that continues to work. The Win 7 boxes will probably break (no loss there as I rarely use them).

If all else fails, for viewing old pages- I'll set up my XP VM with FF 52 and MAF v4.1.4. With a forced date hack if necessary. VMs give a big finger to those who wish to force there unwanted "upgrades" on folks.