One of the biggest reasons I left Netscape Navigator for Internet Explorer years ago was because IE allowed me to save pages using their HTML title tags as the page's file name. I like having this long, descriptive title for the files I save. In contrast, Firefox -- like Netscape before it -- usually uses the page's own file name, rather than its title tag, as the file name when you save. That means you lose lots of descriptive info.

Sure, desktop search tools like Google Desktop make saving pages by page title less important -- but I still like doing it. Firefox lacking this has been one of my biggest problems, nor am I alone. Check out the comments here, here or here, for example.

I tried finding a solution through various searches via Google and Yahoo but came up with no luck, only some of the gripes noted above. But Ask Jeeves came through for me with my search there, getting me to this page with part of the answer that in turn led to this great tutorial with a step-by-step part.

Two parts? That's because the forum discussion I came across had instructions on how to modify a fix for Mozilla to work for Firefox. You can read both pages I've mentioned to learn more. However, the steps I followed are also below. I'm sure there was a better way to do this, but hey, it worked for me.

Here's what I did. WARNING! It may not work for you. It perhaps might screw up your Firefox installation.

1. Closed FireFox.
    
2. Went to C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\chrome (if you use Windows, this is the typical location. If not, find where Firefox was installed and locate the chrome subdirectory).
    
3. Found browser.jar (the right file according to this).
    
4. Made copy of browser.jar called old browser.jar as an emergency backup.
    
5. Opened browser.jar and opened with WinZip by dragging-and-dropping the file on it. Don't have Winzip? You can rename browser.jar to browser.zip, then right click and choose Extract.
    
6. Extracted browser.jar to my C Drive, so that all the files within it unfolded within a C:\content folder.
    
7. Closed WinZip, copied browser.jar to the C:\content folder.
    
8. Found within the C:\content\browser folder the contentAreaUtils.js file.
    
9. Moved lines of code within contentAreaUtils.js as explained here.
    
10. Opened the copy of browser.jar within the C:\content folder with WinZip
     
11. Drag-and-dropped contentAreaUtils.js into the copy of browser.jar opened with WinZip, using the Save full path info option. This ensured that the existing version was replaced. If you do it wrong, you'll end up with two versions of the file.
     
12. Closed WinZip, then replaced old browser.jar with updated version of browser.jar

Obviously, a plug-in would be much nicer. If you know of one, let me know. Even better, if you build one, let me know, so I can sing your praises!

Postscript: A much easier solution now exists. See Extension For Getting Firefox To Save Pages Using Page Titles.

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