The Mozilla Archive Format (MAFF) is a legacy
Web archive file format that was provided by
Firefox
Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and ...
through an
extension,
used to store one or more web pages with their associated audio, video, and other related web resources to a single file.
Unlike
MHTML, which uses
MIME
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is an Internet standard that extends the format of email messages to support text in character sets other than ASCII, as well as attachments of audio, video, images, and application programs. Messa ...
encoding within a single HTML file, MAFF compresses the page into a
ZIP
Zip, Zips or ZIP may refer to:
Common uses
* ZIP Code, USPS postal code
* Zipper or zip, clothing fastener
Science and technology Computing
* ZIP (file format), a compressed archive file format
** zip, a command-line program from Info-ZIP
* Zi ...
container
A container is any receptacle or enclosure for holding a product used in storage, packaging, and transportation, including shipping.
Things kept inside of a container are protected on several sides by being inside of its structure. The term ...
file.
The extension supported versions of Firefox from 2007 to 2018 but not later, and there are no plans to update it.
It continued to be supported in
Cyberfox and
Waterfox, forks of Firefox that try to keep features removed from Firefox like the traditional extension API. Browser extension
WebScrapBook (with assistant PyWebScrapBook), available for Firefox 57+ and Chromium-based browsers, supports saving and opening MAFF files.
Pale Moon extension MozArchiver, a fork of the original extension, provides the same support for Pale Moon 26.0 and newer.
Existing files in the discontinued .maff format can be accessed by extracting the internal folders and files with an unarchiver such as
7-Zip
7-Zip is a free and open-source file archiver, a utility used to place groups of files within compressed containers known as "archives". It is developed by Igor Pavlov and was first released in 1999. 7-Zip has its own archive format called 7 ...
. It also allows for automatic processing, e.g. as ZIP-type in local search machines (like DocFetcher). Pale Moon allows .maff files to be opened in MS Windows.
Format licensing
MAFF is an
open file format. The file format specification is published.
See also
*
data URI scheme
The data URI scheme is a uniform resource identifier (URI) scheme that provides a way to include data in-line in Web pages as if they were external resources. It is a form of file literal or here document. This technique allows normally separate ...
*
Microsoft Compiled HTML Help
Microsoft Compiled HTML Help is a Microsoft proprietary online help format, consisting of a collection of HTML pages, an index and other navigation tools. The files are compressed and deployed in a binary format with the extension .CHM, for C ...
*
MHTML
*
Webarchive
SingleFileZ
External links
*
* {{webarchive , url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191101222211/http://legacycollector.org/firefox-addons/212/index.html , date=1 November 2019 , title=MAF Addon Archive — direct links to the XPI files might require non-Firefox based browsers (or older Firefox based) in order to download.
*
ttps://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/webscrapbook/ MAFF format as option in WebScrapBook for FirefoxMAFF format as option in WebScrapBook for Chrome browsers (Chrome, Chromium etc.)
Sources cited
Web Archives
Archive formats
Firefox