Take Screen Capture of Webpages in Firefox

How do I take a screen capture of an entire web page in Firefox ?

The easiest way to take a screenshot of a Firefox window is to press the Print Screen key. This screen picture is copied to the Clipboard which can then be pasted in any graphic editor.

But the Prnt Scrn key approach is quite limited since you cannot take screen captures of selected regions or a screenshot of a long webpage that scrolls across multiple pages.

Another approach is to convert the webpage to PDF using Adobe CreatePDF service that takes a web address and converts the webpage to PDF. Then convert the PDF to any image format like TIFF,TIF,JPEG,JPG,BMP,WMF,EMF,PNG or TGA.

Sounds complicated ? Yes it is. Fortunately, there are some excellent screen capture extensions (.xpi) for Firefox that eliminate the need of third-party apps.

1. ScreenGrab - As the name suggests, Screen Grab saves the entire webpage as an image. The screengrab plugin can capture the current browser window, any visible portion of the browser window and even capture the entire website being viewed in Firefox.

When you capture the whole web document, this screen capture plugin scrolls the page around taking snapshots every time. At the end it stitches them all back together again and asks you where you’d like to save the image. The screenshots are saved as PNG format. Screengrab requires Java Virtual Machine. Supports Firefox 1.0+

2. Page Saver - This screenshot extension is similar to ScreenGrab but doesn’t require Java. Pearl Crescent Page Saver lets you save an image of a web page to a file in PNG format. The Page Saver extension uses the new canvas feature that was introduced in Firefox 1.5.

With Page Saver, you can either Save Image of Visible Portion or Save an Image of Entire WebPage. With Pagesaver, you can adjust the size of the saved images. Page content generated by plugins (such as Flash-based content) is not included in saved images. Page Saver currently works on Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. Linux support is planned soon.



3. Techsmith SnagIt for Firefox remains my favorite extension for taking webpage snapshots - The SnagIt Firefox extension installs a small custom toolbar in Firefox. SnagIt’s extension for the Firefox browser enables users to take screen captures of an entire scrolling window, Web page, region, or even text that can be edited. The screen captures can be sent to files, clipboards, printers, or e-mail.

The screen captures can be viewed within the Preview Window and you can perform basic image editing tasks such as flip, reverse, trim, and rotate, as well as other special effects and color adjustments.

SnagIt is a wonderful Screen Capture software from Techsmith, the developers of Camtasia Studio.