Firefox: How to save .htm files so the urls work

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I asked this at the Mozilla support site awhile back, but I’m getting no responses.

I recently upgraded to an HP computer with Win7. On all my previous computers, I could save webpages as a .htm file and when I clicked on a link in that file, it would send me to the original linked-to page. Now, it seems to only save relative information as to where the page is on my hard drive. I need it to go back on the Internet when I click on a link and send me to the real page. I’ve tried clearing history, cache, etc., to no avail.

What can I do? Thanks!

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When I want to save a web page in Win 7, I click File, Save As and choose Web Page HTML only from the save as type drop down box. When I click on the link, the original web page opens. I can then surf away from this page as I please. Is this what you are looking for? This is in IE. The same happens when I attempt this in Firefox. When I click on the link I saved, the original web page opens in the browser.

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Why not just save as a bookmark?

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On all my previous computers, I could save webpages as a .htm file and when I clicked on a link in that file, it would send me to the original linked-to page. Now, it seems to only save relative information as to where the page is on my hard drive. I need it to go back on the Internet when I click on a link and send me to the real page.

Firefox is similar to IE in offering the option to save either the HTML of the page you’re viewing as it was sent from the server (HTML only), or the page you’re viewing modified to refer to local copies of the images, style sheets, and so on, required to render the page offline (“complete”). In the first case, the links are not changed to refer back to the web site, while in the second case, they are. When you save, check the drop-down and choose the preferred method.

Unfortunately, there isn’t an option to simply insert a tag into the plain HTML to refer all relative links back to the original server. While you can add that into the page with a script, it doesn’t get saved, since it isn’t part of the original source. Maybe there is an add-on that works around that limitation.

Until then, you could open the saved page in WordPad or your favorite text editor, and add this just after the tag (filling in the relevant URL):

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Dear folks,

jscher2000 found the solution I was looking for. When I chose Save Page As, I was not defaulting to Web Page (Complete). That is the way I wanted to save a lot of my files. I just performed some experiments, and–voila! Now it works!

@ TedMyers — Thanks for your reply. I could save a page–the default Firefox choice was All Files–and it was saving as Web Page, HTML Only, but I didn’t know that. Such files did indeed open in a browser, but in my case, I couldn’t navigate away from them by clicking on any links in them.

@ Roderunner — I’ve found that a lot of my bookmarks have ended up pointing to placeholding pages only–or nothing at all–as time goes by. If the info is something I really want to keep, I’ve found it better to actually save the page. Just my preference.

Thanks to all of you for trying to be of service. This is such a GREAT forum; you people are so caring and all that…!

Sniffling in a maudlin fashion–

JHensley

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