If there was any universal immutable truth to the internet, it’s that things vanish from it all the time. Those pages you bookmarked last year? They may be gone. Those forums posts that contained a wealth of useful information? They may be gone as well.

There are several different ways to archive web pages.

You could use ScreenGrab for Firefox. But the problem is that you can text-search anything in an image.

You could use PDF Creator and "print" pages to PDF. This does allow text searching, but the PDF rarely looks anything like the original page and any images present look "off."

What truly works are MHT files. I’ve mentioned this before but have a few extra goodies to make it even easier.

What’s the difference between an MHT and a regular "Save Page As.."? The MHT is an actual single-file archive that contains all the code and images. It’s a great way to archive web pages that contain information you want to save.

Firefox does not have native ability to read or save MHT files, however with UnMHT, you can. It will even read MHTs saved by Internet Explorer, and IE will also read MHTs saved by Firefox. In addition to that, UnMHT has the ability to save all open tabs at once – something that IE 8 doesn’t do.

See video below for details on how it all works.

Firefox has nice built in password management features, however the one thing it is missing is the ability to export your saved information. Doing so is a nice way to get these entries into a password manager program. To add this ability to Firefox, check out the appropriately named Password Exporter add-on.

This extension allows you to export your saved passwords and disabled login hosts using XML or CSV files that can be imported in another browser or computer.

This is the functionality you would expect: simple and effective. Just make sure you do not keep the export files sitting around as the data is stored in plain text. When you are done with these files, be sure to permanently delete them.

People save web pages to ensure they can retrieve information later without having to load it on the internet. It also is a way of retrieving a web page just in case the original web site has an outage or goes offline for whatever reason.

There are two basic ways of saving web pages, that being via the browser or "printing it" to a PDF.

Via the browser

The browser that has the absolute best web page save feature is Internet Explorer 8, due to the fact it can save entire web pages as a "Web Archive." When you click File/Save As (if you don’t see that in your IE 8, press ALT on your keyboard to bring up that menu,) you’ll see it as a save option:

When you choose to save it will "crunch" everything into a single file:

Why is this the best? Because it’s a single file that contains everything (and that’s why it’s labeled as an archive.) All the text, all the images and everything included. If you load it afterward, it looks exactly the way it was originally. It is to the best of my knowledge the only browser that does it right.

Other browsers, such as Firefox, save as "Web page, complete" and it’s nothing but a huge mess. An HTML file will be saved which is the web page, but a subfolder will also be created with all the images, JavaScript files, etc. You can literally get 20+ files out of a single web page save.

Love or hate IE 8, it rules the roost when it comes to web page archiving.

Drawbacks:

• Only one – it’s proprietary to IE 8. Otherwise it’s the best way to archive a web page.

Via PDF Creator

If you don’t use IE 8 and want a web to save web pages a single files that include images and so on, the best way to do this is to use PDF Creator to create PDF files. This is free software that will install a virtual print driver and can be used in your web browser of choice.

Once installed, go to any web page, load it, then click File/Print or press CTRL+P. 

Choose PDF Creator from the window that appears:

..click OK.

The page will be crunched and made ready for PDF rendering:

You’ll see this:

Click the Save button at bottom right. You’ll be asked to name the file and where you want to save it to. Once done, the page is archived as a PDF.

Drawbacks:

• Many times the PDF creator will default to a serif font (Times New Roman) instead of the font seen on the original web page.
• Any links in the web page will not work in the PDF.

These drawbacks are usually acceptable being it’s the text you care about the most when it comes to a web page. Any images on the page will be embedded in the PDF; all text is searchable as well.

In addition, the PDF created even for very large web pages will be small in file size, suitable for sending in email if you want to send it off to a friend.

Via ScreenGrab

This is for Firefox only.

ScreenGrab is a FireFox plugin. It allows you to save a PNG or JPEG screen shot of any web page, but does so far better than ALT+PrintScreen. ScreenGrab will take an image of the entire page including the full length. The screen shot taken will look identical to what you see on-screen.

Drawbacks:

• Since the output file is an image, none of the text can be searched and links won’t work either.
• The default output file is a PNG. If the web page you save is very long, the file saved will be enormous.
• On very large web pages it can cause Firefox to freeze up when attempting to take a full screen shot, particularly on slower computers.

You can make the screen shot ScreenGrab takes to be smaller by purposely not using the browser maximized, because yes, ScreenGrab captures everything – including all the white space on the sides.

To use ScreenGrab, install the add-on, then on any web page, right-click and choose ScreenGrab:

"Complete Page/Frame" will save the entire page, length and all.

"Visible portion" only captures what the browser is displaying at that moment.

"Selection" allows you to select what you want captured.

"Window" acts like ALT+PrintScreen does.

Choosing to Save will save the file. Choosing to Copy will copy the image to the clipboard buffer where you can paste into another program such as an image editor, Word, etc.

Firefox 3 stores pretty much all user data in an internal SQLite database. This database includes, but is not limited to, bookmarks, history, passwords and add-on data. Of course, over time this can eventually require maintenance:

As any other database, SQLite databases become fragmented over time and empty spaces appear all around. But, since there are no managing processes checking and optimizing the database, these factors eventually result in a performance hit. So, a good way to improve startup and some other bookmarks and history related tasks is to defragment and trim unused space from these databases.

So much like your file system needs to be defragged every now and then, so should your Firefox database. This article titled “Speedup Firefox and Surf Web Faster-Clean SQLite Database” explains exactly how to do it.

The process is very simple and shouldn’t take more than a minute or so to run it. So if you haven’t ever done this, go ahead and give it a run.

Caret Browsing is when you use your keyboard to navigate a web page as you would if you were in a text editor or word processing application. This style of moving within a document is nothing new as it’s been around for a very long time, however most don’t know it exists in web browsers. IE and Firefox both have the Caret Browsing feature, accessible by pressing F7 on your keyboard.

The best use of Caret Browsing is to precisely select blocks of text. When you use your mouse to highlight text, often it will occur that the browser selects something you didn’t want to. With Caret Browsing, the browser enables a cursor that you can move with your keyboard and get right to where you want to be, highlight, select, copy and then paste into your preferred text or document editor.

See video for details below.

Yesterday I posted a tip which involves updating your Firefox about:config settings. This data is essentially the registry of your Firefox install as it controls many aspects of how the browser behaves. So if you are going to do some experimentation with these settings, it is important to have a backup just in case.

This article walks you through the process of both backing up and restoring your Firefox about:config data. Alternately, if you want to restore the original default settings, this article walks you through it.

Better safe than sorry.

Firefox 3 added a much improved location bar which searches your URL history, bookmarks, tags, etc while you type. For power users wanting to control/tweak the behavior of the location bar, check out this article titled ‘Firefox 3.5 Location Bar Preferences‘.

The author gives you a detailed explanation of exactly how the location bar behaves as well as how to manipulate it. The topics covered are:

1. Toggle suggestions on and off
2. Customize what results get shown
3. Change the matching behavior as you type

Note: I would only recommend those who know what they are doing tweak these settings, otherwise you may end up hosing your Firefox configuration data.

In our last episode.. I talked about how much web browsers suck. But now it’s time to discuss how great they are.

The best way to describe the greatness of modern web browsers is to point out the features we have now that most people take for granted.

1. Tabbed Document Interface

Most people know this as simply tabs. This was one of the best improvements ever made in a web browser. And said honestly, I cannot browse without them. I first remember first using a tabbed interface with Maxthon (which used the IE engine). IE took a very long time to develop a tabbed version of their own, but finally brought one to the table with IE 7. Better late than never, I suppose.

2. Zoom

I first used a zoom feature in Opera way back at version 5 and it was great. Unfortunately Opera was a pay-browser back then so that was a no-go for me. IE always did have the ability to increase text size but not images (that wasn’t until much later). Firefox always had a zoom but it didn’t work properly until version 3. Fortunately, all browsers now have a proper zoom feature. They will even zoom Flash content now.

3. Better bookmarks

Bookmarks now not only hold information on the URL of the site you want to go to, but also the "favicon" (small image representing the site, should it have one) and can also contain keyword tags in browsers like Firefox.

4. In-browser search bar using search engine of choice

This is something a ton of people take for granted. Early browsers had absolutely no search bar whatsoever. You had the address bar and that was it. If you wanted to search Yahoo, you had to physically go to www.yahoo.com to do it.

Before the search bar there were add-on toolbars for both Netscape and IE. One of the more popular offerings was Google Toolbar (which is still available). However with any toolbar you were forced to the search engine provided and no other.. that is unless you wanted to install yet another toolbar. And of course people remember their Netscapes and IEs back then with 2 or more toolbars in it. Rather terrible. And crash-prone.

Search bars now allow any engine to be used with no additional memory munched up since it’s integrated into the browser.

5. Full screen mode.

This is yet another vastly underrated feature. It is (to the best of my knowledge) universally accessible on the Windows platform by pressing F11 in IE, Firefox or Opera. You press F11 again to go back to windowed mode.

Full screen mode is great because it dedicates your entire screen to whatever web page you’re viewing. In fact, you can make it "book like" by pressing F11, then increasing the zoom a few times (CTRL-plus or just plus in Opera) for maximum readability.

A small note for those looking to buy a netbook: Know your full-screen feature in your browser because I’ll guarantee that you will use it. A lot.

What features of modern browsers do you like?

Chime in with a comment or two.

The web browser is the most used application on your computer, period. Even when you’re not using it, it’s probably minimized to the taskbar/dock/panel.

Unfortunately web browsers still to this day have a fair degree of suck factor. Here are 5 reasons why web browsers suck:

1. Plugins are the browser’s own worst enemy

I call them plugins. Call then "add-ons" or "extensions" or whatever else you want. They’re plugins.

Plugins are a wonderful way to seriously screw up your browser in short order.

In Internet Explorer 8: In Manage Add-ons there is absolutely no way to uninstall anything there. Not possible. This sucks. You can "disable", but not uninstall. This is because add-ons in IE are "tied" directly to external programs. So in order to get rid of it, you must actually go uninstall the program that uses IE – assuming you know which to uninstall.

In Mozilla Firefox: Many plugins create SQL tables internally to the browser in order for them to work. On an uninstall of many different plugins, files are left behind and the SQL tables remain – in several different places. And darned if you know which tables within Firefox you’re supposed to drop. Thought you could kill this stuff with a registry/file cleaner? Wrong. Has to be done manually. This is assuming you actually know where to look.

And, of course, whenever a new version of the browser is released, plugins break.

2. Proprietary crapola

Internet Explorer is the one to blame for this catastrophe. The fact there are still web sites to this day that are "IE only" is simply ridiculous.

And if you put a tag on your site that says, "Best viewed with Firefox", that’s just as bad. You should be ashamed of yourself for doing such a thing.

3. Copy/paste text from a web page is still a nightmare

Sometimes all you want to do is copy a little piece of text rather than type it out. Good luck with that, because you’ll need it.

Some web pages have it so you can copy/paste text easily. But on others when you attempt to highlight anything this huge BLOCK of text is copied. Then when you try to adjust the highlight you made, it gets even worse.

Let’s say for the moment you’re successful in copying some text to the buffer. Okay, we’re good, right? Wrong. On paste into something as simple as Notepad these huge SPACES happen. "Wait, wait.. I didn’t copy any big-ass spaces.." Well, Mr. Browser thinks you did.

Out of frustration you just have to type out whatever you wanted to copy yourself.

4. Printing web pages is still terrible

Some web sites make it easy to print things. For example, many bank web sites smartly offer PDF versions of bank statements for print-out. This is great because PDFs always print exactly the way you see them.

But let’s say you’re not on a bank site and you want to print something out. The text is either too big or too small on the printed page, the graphics (should any exist) look terrible, and what is that font that printed? That’s not what’s on the web page..

5. Slow!

Believe it or not, there was a time when IE was a really fast browser. That was way back at version 3. And it was wonderful.

Believe it or not, there was a time when Firefox was a really fast browser. That was way back at version 1.5. And it was wonderful.

Both are now are memory hogging, plugin-infested lumps of digital slowness.

Want to know why Google Chrome and Safari appear to run faster? It’s not because of less memory consumption or faster scripting. It’s because you’re not using the same plugins as in your IE or FF.

Unfortunately most don’t like Chrome or Safari.

Am I saying to run IE or FF with no plugins at all? Well, if you can browse that way, I’d say go right ahead. Ditch the toolbars and any plugins installed to breathe life back into the browser. It will speed up quite a bit. That is until you open up a few tabs with some Flash, and then.. it.. gets.. slower.. and….. slower…… and, well.. it would be faster for you to go to the kitchen and make a sandwich.

What do you hate about web browsers the most?

Let us know by writing a comment or two.

I don’t think there’s any denying that Firefox 3.5 is late to the party concerning other browsers have had features (like private browsing) FF is only getting now. Regardless, here’s my real-world review on it.

Instead of getting into the super-techy details on this I’m going to concentrate on what most would care about.

Will 3.5 break add-ons?

Unfortunately yes, and a lot of them. This has been widely reported to be true, and it even broke a few of the ones I use so you can count me in as well. When I say "broke" it means "incompatible with 3.5".

Fortunately the 3.5 installer will tell you which will break before actually installing the software. So if from what you see there are add-ons you can’t live without, wait a bit before upgrading. Run the installer again in a week, have it check your plugins, and once everything checks out, then go for the install.

Is the Private Browsing feature any good?

Yes, but unfortunately it’s not very user-friendly. In all other browsers that have this feature you know you’re using it. IE 8 has a blue "InPrivate" notice in the address bar. Chrome has the detective-with-hat graphic. Firefox has nothing other than a notice in the title bar that says (Private Browsing). This is far too easy to dismiss once you leave the initial notice page. There should be something more obvious, such as a different-colored address bar, a graphic.. something.

The way in which it works is not exactly intuitive either.

Here’s the deal:

Let’s say you have three tabs open. This is very typical for Firefox users because they use multiple tabs often. You want to open a Private Browsing session, so you click Tools/Start Private Browsing. You get the notice you’re going Private, so you click OK.

*Poof*, the tabs you had open are gone. Not cool. Did they disappear? No. You can get them back by stopping the Private session via Tools/Stop Private Browsing and ta-da, then they return.

A Private session should always, repeat, always launch a new window so you don’t lose the tabs you currently have open.

If you’re saying, "Couldn’t a private session be opened as, say, a private tab with color indicating it’s a private session?" I wish. That would be a super-cool feature. But it doesn’t exist as it would require two independent sessions operating within the same browser window. This is not outside the realm of possibility as Google Chrome does technically do that sorta/kinda with separate processes for the way it does tabs, but even it launches a separate window at present for the way it does private browsing. Tabs which can be separated as private or public is nothing but pipe dream territory at this point.

Is the TraceMonkey engine any good?

TraceMonkey is the new JavaScript rendering engine in Firefox. If you use any kind of web-based email you will immediately notice a speed increase as all webmail sites use heavy scripting.

I tested this with a few site I know to be script-heavy and yes I did notice it was faster on load. I’m not going to say it was a night-and-day difference, but it was noticeable. As far as I’m concerned, any speed increase is a good one.

Did any web sites I normally use break?

Not a one. Firefox isn’t like IE where on any major version change stuff breaks on certain web sites. In fact I’ve never known FF to be like that. Quite the opposite, actually.

The deal-maker or deal-breaker is add-on compatibility

If you’re a Firefox user, this above all else will determine whether you use it or not. I personally went ahead and did it and switch to IE 8 for the stuff that broke in FF 3.5 (such as the LogMeIn add-on), so it’s not a big deal for me. Developers will also be playing catch-up in short order in the next coming weeks, so the broken add-ons will be fixed in due time.

Today’s tip will be a quick one as the much anticipated Firefox 3.5 is now available for download.

This new version boasts a faster javascript engine, HTML 5 support, private browsing and overall faster performance. If you are interested you can read about all the changes here.

Before upgrading, make sure all the add-ons you use are compatible with the new version. Personally, I like to hold off on new releases until a few service updates have been released, so I will not upgrade immediately. Of course, that is my personal preference so if you want to be on the bleeding edge, go get it.

If you really want to dig into Firefox customizations and make some interface changes which may not be available through existing themes or add-ons then utilizing the userChrome.css file is what you need to do. Don’t worry, you don’t have to learn a scripting language (unless you want to of course) as there a numerous customizations available for you already.

This is a good tidbit to know because you can apply small changes without having to go out and find and apply a new theme. For example, you can move the URL location bar under the selected tab (just like how Google Chrome handles it).

If you are curious about other uses, just google userChrome.css and see what is out there.

Using a beta edition web browser is something most people don’t want to do, especially when it comes to Firefox. Why? Because there’s a risk it may break one or more of the add-ons you have installed in the browser. And it’s a pain to do all that install/uninstall crap because it’s not just for the browser but all your add-ons as well. This can prove to be irritating in short order.

Is there a way to use the new Firefox without actually installing it on your hard drive? Of course there is. You can install it to your USB stick where it will stay self-contained.

Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 does have a PortableApps version, and said honestly this is the absolute best way to try out the browser without messing with your existing 3.0.10 that’s on your hard drive now. Not only can you use it but also test your add-ons to see which will work or bust.

For those that haven’t used PortableApps before, here’s how to use it:

First, find a USB stick you’ve got lying around somewhere. Even if it’s an ancient 128MB stick, that’s fine. Erase/format the stick to free up the space.

Second, after installation, make note of the drive letter assigned to the stick. For most people this is drive E or F.

Third, download PortableApps and install it. When it asks where to install to, use the drive letter assigned to the USB stick.

Note: I suggest downloading the "Platform Only" version of PortableApps, especially if you have a stick with a minimal amount of space on it.

Fourth, download FF 3.5 beta 4 from here. Run the installer (the installation directory should point to the PortableApps directory on your USB stick).

Run the browser from PortableApps afterward, and that’s all there is to it.

Looks like this when finished:

On launch:

Confirmation it is 3.5 beta 4:

To those wondering, no, you cannot run FF 3.0.10 and 3.5 at the same time. That was the first thing I tried. Regardless of that, it was cool I can run this browser without having to actually install it to the hard drive.

Once launched it’s quite speedy even though it’s running off USB.

If you want to try out add-ons, go right ahead; they will be installed to the stick directly.

To those with slower PCs and/or (gasp) USB 1.1, there is the option to not store session information when you first run FF. Otherwise if you’ve got USB 2.0 and a relatively decent PC speed-wise, you can have it store sessions and it runs just fine.

If you consistently have a bunch of tabs open when using Firefox, one problem you may have is following the ‘breadcrumb’ of how tabs relate to each other. For example, if you are looking at search results on troubleshooting and then follow a link which opens a new tab and follow another link which opens another new tab (etc., etc.), the tabs can be cumbersome to backtrack. To help with this, check out the Tree Style Tab add-on:

This provides tree-style tab bar, like a folder tree of Windows Explorer. New tabs opened from links (or etc.) are automatically attached to the current tab. If you often use many many tabs, it will help your web browsing because you can understand relations of tabs.

Their explanation hopefully clarifies my example, but checkout the screenshots on the link and you will see exactly what it does.

I find this particularly useful when researching code documentation because I can jump back and forth between my search results and any message boards and articles I opened from there.

Most web sites will work with no issue using Firefox 3 or Internet Explorer 8. But there will be times you encounter a web page that will instantly crash your browser. One such example is crappy MySpace pages. It is very common to find pages with the following junk in it:

• Animated background graphic
• Animated Flash graphics
• Auto-play music player
• Other graphics pulled in from many different web sites (from the "comments" section on such pages)

It’s awful. And even if you have an absolutely default browser with no add-ons/plugins installed, pages like this can still crash your browser.

A way around this is to use the "No-Style" option which effectively kills almost all the crap on pages like this and keeps the browser from crashing.

In Firefox and IE: View / Page Style / No Style

In IE, if you don’t see the "View" on the menubar, just press ALT to see the menu.

Using No-Style will make web pages look Web 1.0-like. It reverts the style to the default font and makes otherwise "heavy" pages easy to scroll and read.

In addition, you can whiz thru the pages much faster. Granted, it may be "ugly", but it’s much faster than with everything loaded.

I do use this feature periodically because there are some web designs out there that are simply awful. And while (on Windows) Times New Roman 16-pixel size in black on a white background may be not-so stylish, it sure is easy to read.

Also remember that selecting "Basic Page Style" or "Default Style" puts the browser back in normal viewing mode, which it’s in by default.