This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

why won't pages saved from page source open as a web page?

more options

Hello. Using Firefox 42 now. With previous versions of Firefox I could view the page source, then save the page source, it would be a .htm file on my computer, then when I opened the page source in my browser, it would display as a normal web page. Now when I open the saved page source, it opens as html text only. Any way to change this?

Hello. Using Firefox 42 now. With previous versions of Firefox I could view the page source, then save the page source, it would be a .htm file on my computer, then when I opened the page source in my browser, it would display as a normal web page. Now when I open the saved page source, it opens as html text only. Any way to change this?

All Replies (3)

more options

Try to save the file as a text file if Firefox shows the page source in a tab.

Current Firefox version open the page source in a Tab (view_source.tab) and saving this page works differently. You get html code as you see it with context highlighting code as you will notice if you check the file in a text editor.

Endret av cor-el

more options

cor-el said

Try to save the file as a text file if Firefox shows the page source in a tab. Current Firefox version open the page source in a Tab (view_source.tab) and saving this page works differently. You get html code as you see it with context highlighting code as you will notice if you check the file in a text editor.

This helped but not by saving as a txt file. That just gives me html code in a txt file instead of an htm file. What helped was setting the view_source.tab option to false. Now the page source opens in a new window, and when I save it, when I open the saved file in the browser, it appears as a web page (as before). I would not have thought that there would be a difference in the htm files saved via tab or window, (and it seems strange), but anyway, problem solved, thanks.

more options

Why do you save by opening and then save the page source?

I just save any web page by file -> save page as -> web page html only or -> web page complete (Sorry, I run german FF, so I am not sure about correct english menu...)

so it is always saved as .htm/.html file.

I set my FF-config "view_source.editor.path" to notepad++, which I use to retrieve information from the webpage.