@JeelShah have you tried Import[...,"String"]?

@kirkus Import[..., "Text"] is often better. "String" doesn't convert new lines and stuff I think

@b3m2a1 good point, I wonder if it might also handle UTF8/Unicode sequences better.

although, interesting... "String" is 2.5x faster, and StringSplit[text]==StringSplit[string] is True for a ~1MB HTML file. <shrug>