MAFF support discontinued

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Georg_X
Posts: 4
Joined: October 16th, 2017, 11:36 pm

MAFF support discontinued

Post by Georg_X »

It appears there is probably no way out. So this is more a cry of desperation rather than in the hope of assistance.

I realize this is free software and there is a number of people working so the rest of us can have fun and thank you for it. But you don't want only Hail Ceasar's, right?

However, I fail to understand the apparent sloppiness in the haste of releasing a new version that cannot -yet, I hope- support a major feature of the previous version. This is not like changing the symbol of favorites or the location of a menu item. This is completely screwing up a potentially huge collection of files scattered all over our intricate folder tree in our terrabytes of HDD space (for the vast majority of users looking for them in "downloads" is lame - no one really expects a user to have only 3-4 of those files, does one?).

As lame is the option of converting them to a multi-file/folder format (having a folder/subfolder/multiple files is ridiculous and impractical). Not wanting this is the main reason behind moving to the maff format (or mht for IE) in the first place. Had we known development would be inconsistent as this, we would have stuck with pdf'ing our webpages rather than trusting Mozilla...

In my book, not being able to support such a major asset makes the new version of Firefox inadequately developed and too immature to replace the current one and it will remain so until a way to support maff files is incorporated.
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DanRaisch
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Joined: September 23rd, 2004, 8:57 pm
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Re: MAFF support discontinued

Post by DanRaisch »

Umm, you are clear that we are not Mozilla, right? See the disclaimer in the right hand column of this page. We're an independent user-helping-user community.
Georg_X
Posts: 4
Joined: October 16th, 2017, 11:36 pm

Re: MAFF support discontinued

Post by Georg_X »

Yes, and I love them too. Plus there was a link to this forum on their main support page if the faq was was not enough, so I guess they love us back and hopefully read this.

Ahh, yes, the 2nd person in the beginning. My bad.
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RobertJ
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Re: MAFF support discontinued

Post by RobertJ »

Georg_X wrote:so I guess they love us back and hopefully read this.
"They" do not view this forum.

.
FF 92.0 - TB 78.13 - Mac OSX 10.13.6
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Reflective
Posts: 2283
Joined: February 15th, 2007, 11:13 am

Re: MAFF support discontinued

Post by Reflective »

May offer an alternative to what you're looking for: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... e-page-we/
Georg_X
Posts: 4
Joined: October 16th, 2017, 11:36 pm

Re: MAFF support discontinued

Post by Georg_X »

Of course and thank you very much. I had found and tried this addon earlier today a couple if times. The problem remains with our years' long data in maff files. Keeping an old version of firefox along with the uodated one is not practical. PC's are there to facilitate our lives ... or are they?...
allande
Posts: 188
Joined: July 20th, 2017, 11:58 am

Re: MAFF support discontinued

Post by allande »

This thread http://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/ind ... ic=28492.0 links to a plugin for Total Commander that can view maff files. Right away, while you have the MAF extension still available, some posts say it can convert maff files as well to other formats. If you convert them to html directories they would be viewable, or if you convert them to MHT you can view those in a few things.
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James
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Re: MAFF support discontinued

Post by James »

Georg_X wrote:Yes, and I love them too. Plus there was a link to this forum on their main support page if the faq was was not enough, so I guess they love us back and hopefully read this.
Mozilla has had their own support forum for desktop Firefox and some other things for a while now at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions . Mozilla did make use of this independent forum for desktop Firefox support back in earlier days from Nov 2002 til 2007/2008 when they got their own forum started somewhat.

The Mozilla Archive Format, with MHT and Faithful Save extension at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addo ... ve-format/ is not made by Mozilla but by a third-party like the vast majority of Extensions being hosted at addons.mozilla.org
Georg_X
Posts: 4
Joined: October 16th, 2017, 11:36 pm

Re: MAFF support discontinued

Post by Georg_X »

I am trying to figure a way to save the maff files in another single-file format. Files within folders and subfolders is not practical. So far I have failed...
ZenerDiode
Posts: 1
Joined: October 26th, 2017, 8:02 am

Re: MAFF support discontinued

Post by ZenerDiode »

I have the same problem with over 200 maff files and wondered how I could still view them in Firefox 57. One suggestion is to convert them all to mht files but these are about twice the size, don't always display correctly and will have to be viewed in IE or Chrome. Then I discovered that the maff file is just a normal html file with a sub-directory of images etc which is then zipped into one file. So to view it, all you have to do is unzip it then run the index.html file. So I wrote a batch file to do just that:

Code: Select all

@echo off
	
REM delete all subdirectories of E:\MAFF
	for /D %%F in ("E:\MAFF\*.*") do rmdir /S /Q "%%F"

REM copy .maff file from source to temp directory as .zip file
	copy /Y %1 E:\MAFF\maff_file.zip

REM unzip copied file
	setlocal
	cd /d %~dp0
	Call :UnZipFile "E:\MAFF\" "E:\MAFF\maff_file.zip"

REM change to temp directory
	cd /d E:\MAFF

REM find latest subdirectory
	FOR /F "delims=" %%i IN ('dir /b /ad-h /t:c /od') DO SET a=%%i

REM change to latest subdirectory
	cd %a%

REM run html file	
	start index.html

REM delete copied zip file
	del "E:\MAFF\maff_file.zip"

	exit

:UnZipFile <ExtractTo> <newzipfile>
	set vbs="%temp%\_.vbs"
	if exist %vbs% del /f /q %vbs%
	>%vbs%  echo Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
	>>%vbs% echo If NOT fso.FolderExists(%1) Then
	>>%vbs% echo fso.CreateFolder(%1)
	>>%vbs% echo End If
	>>%vbs% echo set objShell = CreateObject("Shell.Application")
	>>%vbs% echo set FilesInZip=objShell.NameSpace(%2).items
	>>%vbs% echo objShell.NameSpace(%1).CopyHere(FilesInZip)
	>>%vbs% echo Set fso = Nothing
	>>%vbs% echo Set objShell = Nothing
	cscript //nologo %vbs%
	if exist %vbs% del /f /q %vbs%

My thanks to 'marapet' for 'find latest subdirectory' and 'Matt Williamson' for the unzip code, both on stackoverflow.com.

I created a temp directory E:\MAFF but you can change that to whatever you want, e.g. C:\Temp\MAFF.

Save the batch file as something like "open_maff.bat".
Then associate the maff extension with the batch file so when you double-click on the maff file it opens in Firefox just like it did before with the add-on. No need to convert the files to anything else.

However the “saved from: <URL>” and “saved on: <date>” header at the top of the page is not shown, but neither is it in IE or Chrome showing an mht file. This is metadata stored in the index.rdf file which I don’t know how to display. But I don’t think it’s important.

Using a batch file will cause a command line window to pop-up briefly while it's running which is annoying. So you can convert the batch file to an exe with a program such as http://www.battoexeconverter.com. Select 'Start Invisible' and you can also change the file icon, e.g. to one of the many Firefox ones. Then associate the maff extension with the exe file instead of the batch file and the maff file will open with no pop-ups.
wsdookadr
Posts: 15
Joined: November 25th, 2008, 6:54 pm

Re: MAFF support discontinued

Post by wsdookadr »

Hey, I'm posting a bit late here but.. maybe it's useful. I had a maff archive I've created between.. maybe 2014 and 2017 and it's like 50GB in size and composed of 930 maff files.
Anyway, since Firefox came up with the new version that broke the MAF extension, have to migrate to something else.
A good alternative to MAF seems to be https://webrecorder.io/ which is quite nice.

In my case, I had some requirements for the migration:
1) pull out of the archives all the PDF files that had URLs with "localhost" or "192.168.0." in them, because those were from my local apache, and I still want to keep those
2) pull out a list of original urls for all documents inside the maff archives, so I could later on re-archive them inside of webrecorder

Before I started, I sorted out the maffs into separate directories depending on topic. Then I wrote a script that would extract what I needed out of each directory.

So here's a script to do this migration:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash
target="$1"
# (this is mainly about pdf files, anything else is less important)
# unpacks every .maff file by taking each file inside of them and either writing it to
# disk unpacked if it was fetched locally when the archive was created initially.
#
# otherwise, if it was fetched remotely, store the url in a file so we can rebuild
# the archive on the other side.
#
# this script will be used to migrate a large amount of .maff files to webrecorder.
# (since maff is being discontinued)
#
# to migrate, what I did is I sorted the maffs into some directories, to regroup them
# then I wrote this oneliner to run this script over all of them
#
# for d in $(find -maxdepth 1 -type d | grep -v "other\|\.$" | sed -e 's/\.\///'); do  ./migrate_maff.sh $d; done
#

export target
mkdir -p /tmp/staging/$target
rm -f /tmp/staging/$target/*
for f in $(find $target -type f); do
    unzip -l $f > /tmp/ziplist.txt
    export f
    cat /tmp/ziplist.txt |  perl -F'\s+' -ne '
    next unless m{index.rdf}; chomp $F[4]; $u=$F[4]; $url_raw=`unzip -c $ENV{f} $u`; $url_raw=~m{originalurl RDF:resource="(.*?)"};
    $orig_url=$1;
    if($orig_url =~ m{localhost|192\.168\.0}) {
        $p=$u;
        $p=~s{index.rdf}{index.pdf};
        $n=$p;
        $n=~s{\/index.pdf}{.pdf};
        $cmd="unzip -c $ENV{f} $p > /tmp/staging/$ENV{target}/$n";
        print stderr "$cmd\n";
        `$cmd`;
    } else {
        print "$orig_url\n";
    }
' >> /tmp/staging/$target/list_urls.txt
done
So now, inside /tmp/staging/ there will be multiple directories, each having a list_urls.txt file and then some .pdfs in there.
Now for each of those list_urls.txt files, it's possible to use a locally installed webrecorder to re-archive those files (yes it's not ideal because
some links might be broken since 2014 but.. that's life):

Code: Select all

cat list_urls.txt | perl -ne 'print if $. >= 1 && $. <= 70' | xargs -I{} /bin/bash -c 'chromium-browser "http://localhost:8089/testauto/some-topic/some-topic/record/{}" ; sleep 3;'
What this does is it opens those urls inside webrecorder, and webrecorder pulls in all the files required to view them offline.
It does this in batches of 70 urls, and it takes some manual work of course, but.. still doable.
It's important to have chromium (or the browser you choose to use for this; I think chrome/chromium are ok for this.. maybe firefox too) already open before you run
this oneliner, in order not to have it block on the first url it opens up.
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