Mozilla Archive Format

The Mozilla Archive Format (MAFF) is a legacy Web archive file format that was provided by Firefox through an extension,^[3] used to store one or more web pages 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 number	04 03 4b 50
Developed by	Christopher Ottley,[1] Paolo Amadini[1]
Initial release	4 May 2004 (2004-05-04)
Type of format	Web-archive, data compression
Container for	Web-pages
Extended from	ZIP
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]
Website	maf.mozdev.org/maff-file-format.html/

The extension supported versions of Firefox from 2007 to 2017 but not later, and there are no plans to update it.^[7] 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.^[8][9] Pale Moon extension MozArchiver, a fork of the original extension, provides the same support for Pale Moon 26.0 and newer.^[10]

Existing files in the discontinued .maff format can be accessed by extracting the internal folders and files with an unarchiver such as 7-Zip. 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 Microsoft Windows.

Format licensing

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

See also

• Data URI scheme
• Microsoft Compiled HTML Help
• MHTML
• Webarchive

External links

• MAF – Mozilla Archive Format, with MHT and Faithful Save at the Wayback Machine (archived 2 November 2017)
• MAF Addon Archive at the Wayback Machine (archived 1 November 2019) — direct links to the XPI files might require non-Firefox based browsers (or older Firefox based) in order to download.
• About the MAFF file format
• User Manual of Firefox Addon MAF – Mozilla Archive Format, with MHT and Faithful Save
• MAFF format as option in WebScrapBook for Firefox
• MAFF format as option in WebScrapBook for Chrome browsers (Chrome, Chromium etc.)
• SingleFileZ on GitHub