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There is this question and others, about saving a complete webpage while online, for which htttrack works and can download a mirror of an entire site and which is one of the answers there.

But what about Save as webpage, HTML Only, when you're offline, just from the Firefox browser? To my surprise, saving even a simple webpage failed for me. This was Firefox 144.0.2 in Dec. 2025. The "Save Page As..." > "Save" button is accepted without error, but upon opening the "Display the progress of ongoing downloads" list -- it says "Failed."

I found a solution, and will share it in an answer.

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  • It only works for me if the page is in the network cache. An easy way to detect this is to press Ctrl+U to open the source in a new tab; if you're offline and the page is not in the cache then you'll see an error message. Commented 9 hours ago

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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This worked for saving a webpage (as HTML) that's in your Firefox browser, while you're offline. Tested on Firefox 144.0.2, Dec. 2025. By default this fails. It's due to a default setting and you can easily change it.

  1. Navigate to about:config and click "Accept risk and continue."
  2. In the search enter browser.download.save_converter_index
  3. By default, the value is 1. Edit it to 0.

Now you can save as HTML the webpage that you had open, without even restarting Firefox or closing that configuration page.

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    Thanks, this may also be a solution for my question about how to get cached images instead of loading the most recent version when saving the page. I'll test it later. Do you know what the option does exactly? Commented 2 days ago
  • @allo You're welcome. Sorry I don't know exactly. Commented 2 days ago
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    If github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/blob/… is any guide, this just makes it forget which of the options you selected in the file type box? At least if I interpret it correctly. Commented 2 days ago
  • This sets the default value of the file type selector. Apparently if you have it set to 1 (web page, complete), it thinks it needs internet access. If the default is set to 0, it realizes that it already has all the necessary information. This is probably a bug (it should allow HTML only even if not initially selected), but I don't know how important they would regard it. Commented 9 hours ago

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