Mozilla Archive Format

The Mozilla Archive Format (MAFF) is a web page archiving format provided by Firefox through an extension.[3] It is used to save one or more web pages together with their associated audio, video, and other related web resources to a single file.[5] Unlike MHTML, which uses MIME encoding within a single HTML file, MAFF compresses the page into a ZIP container file.[6]

Mozilla Archive Format
Filename extension
.maff
Internet media type
application/x-maff
Magic number04 03 4b 50
Developed byChristopher Ottley,[1] Paolo Amadini[1]
Initial release4 May 2004 (2004-05-04)
Type of formatWeb-archive, data compression
Container forWeb-pages
Extended fromZIP
Open format?Yes for the Specification of MAFF file format;[2]
(MAF Firefox Addon)[3] under MPL 1.1, GPL 2.0, LGPL 2.1, or any later version of these licenses;
Documentation is under Copyright;[4]
Websitemaf.mozdev.org/maff-file-format.html/

The extension no longer works on newer (as of 2017) versions of Firefox. The author has stated that future support will not be added.[7] But it is still 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.[8][9] Pale Moon extension MozArchiver, a fork of original extension, bring the same support for Pale Moon 26.0 and newer.[10]

For those who have kept records in .maff format, one way to recover the file contents is to rename .maff to .rar, or .zip, then open the file with an unarchiver like winrar, and extract the existing files and folders. It also allows for automatic processing, e.g. as ZIP-type in local search machines (like DocFetcher). Since MAFF is a well defined open file format, it makes sense to just keep the archived documents and use alternative extensions. At least Pale Moon allows to associate the .maff file type in MS Windows to open it directly with appropriate extensions.

Format Licensing

MAFF is an open file format. The file format specification is published.[2]

See also

Sources cited
  1. "MAF project members". Retrieved 9 September 2013.
  2. "The MAFF specification". Retrieved 9 September 2013.
  3. "Firefox Addon: MAF - Mozilla Archive Format". Archived from the original on 2 November 2017. Retrieved 9 September 2013.
  4. "User's Manual Firefox Addon: MAF - Mozilla Archive Format". Retrieved 9 September 2013.
  5. "About the MAFF file format". maf.mozdev.org. 2011. Retrieved 16 November 2011.
  6. "Mozilla Archive Format". maf.mozdev.org. 2011. Retrieved 16 November 2011.
  7. "Known issues with the Mozilla Archive Format add-on". Retrieved 13 August 2017.
  8. "WebScrapBook on GitHub". Retrieved 11 April 2019.
  9. "webscrapbook ยท PyPI". Retrieved 11 April 2019.
  10. "Pale Moon - Add-ons - MozArchiver". Retrieved 23 April 2018.
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