Rated 4 out of 5 stars

by Dan Harkless on June 28, 2016 · permalink

Saving web pages is very important functionality for me. For instance, I was the one who originally requested the feature to preserve text and other form inputs' state when doing a Save Page As... Web Page, complete (in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=293834).

I save a lot of web pages, and I've always used the "Web Page, complete" format in both Firefox and when occasionally running IE, for cross-platform compatibility. However, the PAGE_files directories introduce a lot of clutter and make it difficult to have directories that have complete web pages saved in them, as well as subdirectories, since your manually created subdirectories get lost in the proliferation of PAGE_files directories. Also adding to the clutter were the .URL files (or .webloc, on Mac) that I had drag and drop from the URL bar for each page saved, so I'd have a record of where the page came from.

Therefore, I was very happy to learn of the Mozilla Archive Format extension, which solves all of the above problems. Pages are saved as single .maff files, with the URL encoded inside them, so the PAGE_files directories and PAGE.URL files clutter can go away, and subdirectories can be found again. And if this add-on ever gets discontinued, I can simply unZIP all the .maff files (well, along with renames of the numeric top-level directory in the ZIPs) to get access to my saved web pages again.

I just have a few issues and wishes for this add-on:

1. In Firefox 47.0, at least, the new URL bar button that's supposed to allow you get the original URL an opened .maff file was saved from does not work. Clicking it simply does nothing. Therefore I am forced to leave on the new Information Bar, and I would prefer not to have to use that vertical real estate. (I do use Classic Theme Restorer, so if this feature works for others, it may be an incompatibility.)

2. It would be nice if this add-on added a submenu (perhaps optionally) to the Tools menu, as some other add-ons do. I have a lot of saved web pages, so I'm regularly coming across directories where I need to run the nicely designed Convert command so the saved files old and new will be .maffs, and it's a pain to have always pull up Tools... Add-ons, then go to Extensions, and then the Options button for Mozilla Archive Format.

3. Speaking of converting old "Web Page, complete" files to MAFF, it would be awesome if the add-on would look for a .URL (or .webloc) file with the same name as the .htm file and if found, use it for the embedded original URL of the page, rather than putting in an unhelpful "file://" URL. Then I would be able to delete all my old *.URL and *.webloc files along with the .htm and *_files directories. Ideally this option should have a (selectable) "loose matching" mode, since Firefox and Windows Explorer have slightly different rules for munging characters in page titles that aren't legal in filenames.

4. It would be great if the "Faithful Save" also included preservation of the original Last-Modified timestamps of the web page and its constituents as reported by the web server. I was one of the people fighting to get Mozilla to do this preservation itself (e.g. see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=178506), but of course they made it a WONTFIX, as they are, uh, "wont" to do. I used to be a very happy user of the "Preserve Download Modification Timestamp" add-on, but it has been broken since 2013, and there is so comparable add-on that I can find. Therefore, it'd be nice if Faithful Save could be updated to preserve Last Modified timestamps.

5. As another user reported, closing a tab/window while it's being saved causes the .maff save to silently fail. Traditionally with Firefox, when doing the standard "Web Page, complete" save, it (surprisingly) didn't cause a problem if you closed the page while it was saving, so a lot of people have gotten used to being able to do that. Mozilla Archive Format should either keep the page alive in cache until the save is complete, or failing that, give you a warning if you start to close the tab/window, or failing that, at least give you a pop-up error when the save fails, rather than failing silently.

6. It's not possible to right-click the page's original URL in the information bar to open that in a new tab/window.

Other than that, thanks so much for this great add-on, and keep up the good work!