What Is It?

A Firefox Add-on that allows you to save and view web pages in a handy single file often known as web archive or “mht” files (from the .mht extension which is for MIME HTML)).

Why Would You Want It?

Firefox doesn’t natively handle the web archive single file format. The advantage is that using this format saves all the elements of the web page as a single file containing graphics, text, etc. This is particularly useful if you want to save web pages to archive, send by email or transport on removable media, flashdrives, etc. As the screenshots below show , where I saved the ProReviewer Homepage, it is a far more simple and tidy solution:

(Click on screenshots to enlarge where necessary)

as the statusbar shows there are a total of 74 files saved in the folder with a standard page save.

This is now all contained in a single file using UnMHT

See below for more details about the mht/web archive file

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Saves web pages as web archive files
• Views mht files in Firefox
• Allows all current tabs to be saved to mht files

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

• Provides a function that should be standard
• Active development appears to be ongoing
• Bulletin board/forum for discussion on issues etc.
• Good Options setting
• Save/Import Options
• Simple to Use

Cons:What’s Not So Good?

• Lack of documentation*

*Although it is simple to use this is a problem with so many Firefox Add-ons, the developers don’t even provide the most basic of help or explanation which highly useful in just deciding on whether to install. 

More About What it Does in Detail:

UnMHT installs just like any other Firefox add-on and is available at the Mozilla Add-ons website.

Quote from the Mozilla Add-ons UnMHT page:

Long Description

Save webpage into single file as MHT (MHTML, RFC2557) format,
and view saved MHT files.

Works with:

Firefox: 1.0 – 3.0.*

There is also some further information at the developers website UnMHT for Firefox

including some known issues:

• Built-in keyboard shortcut is fired when UnMHT’s one is same to it.
• You cannot save to MHT from the default save dialog (you can call it from the context menu of statusbar/toolbar icon or the [File] menu).
• If you have a very old Firefox, this MAF (Mozilla Archive Format) extension installed and the UnMHT extension too, UnMHT can not open a local MHT file.
• This extension conflicts with IETab, while you use IETan in default setting.
• Delete the following Site filter from IETab.
• /^file:\/\/\/.*\.(mht|mhtml)$/
• Firefox/Mozilla Suite will not respond while extracting large files.
• If Content-Type of file is "text/plain", its source code will be shown while extracting.
• It does not support MHT files that have been exported from MS Office (e.g. PowerPoint).

Web Archive/mht Files

Wikipedia has some good information on mht (MHTML):

MHTML stands for MIME HTML. It is used to bind resources which are typically represented by external links, such as image and sound files, together with HTML code into a single file. The content of an MHTML file is encoded as if it were an HTML email message, using the MIME type multipart/related. The first part is the HTML file, encoded normally; subsequent parts are additional resources, identified by their original URLs.

This format is sometimes referred to as MHT, after the suffix .mht given to such files by default when created by Microsoft Word, Internet Explorer or Opera.

Web browser support

Many browsers do not support this format, and the process for saving a web page along with its resources as an MHTML file is not standardized across those browsers that do. Due to this, a web page saved as an MHTML file using one browser may render differently on another.

General Use of UnMHT

Go to Page 2 for more details and screenshots

Go to Page 3 for ProReviewer Summary

Popularity: 42% [?]

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This entry was posted on Sunday, August 3rd, 2008 at 2:18 pm and is filed under Firefox Add-ons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.