Reviews for Save Page WE
Save Page WE by DW-dev
Review by Firefox user 13282130
Rated 5 out of 5
by Firefox user 13282130, 7 years agoI find this tool very neat and useful. It makes saving pages easier, more compact and it can adapt to your needs as well. For example saving a news article resulted in a file somewhat below 700KB, whereas the same page with the Firefox's default save was 5MB overall (plus the additional burden of managing many files). The end results can be hardly distinguished in the browser.
On the other hand with the information I currently possess about this mechanism, I don't think I will be using it as for now, for the following reason:
I'm corcerned as to how other tools (or future tools) that deal with html files will deal with these kinds of giant html files this extension produces, with large binary blobs and scripts embedded (Firefox save produces an html file 700 lines long, this extension: 6700). Encapsulation of data and readability with the classical format may just be too much of an advantage as opposed to the compactness this offers, especially on the long term.
I did a test: I opened the page archived with Save Page and the saved it again but with classic Firefox save. When I reopened that page, aside from the longer opening time, most of the images were lacking and much of the layout was somewhat off. Meaning, even if the visuals can be hardly distinguished, the more can the underlying logic from the perspective of the browser (and most likely from other html parsing tools').
So to sum it up, just as a non-professional in web-dev, I'm having doubts if html format was created for this kind of usage and if it can relatively fairly stand the test of time. For my application this tool, for the aforementioned reasons will not really suffice, nonetheless the engineering is astonishing. In the meanwhile I'm still searching for a tool that focuses its output in one folder and not a folder and a file as Firefox save does.
On the other hand with the information I currently possess about this mechanism, I don't think I will be using it as for now, for the following reason:
I'm corcerned as to how other tools (or future tools) that deal with html files will deal with these kinds of giant html files this extension produces, with large binary blobs and scripts embedded (Firefox save produces an html file 700 lines long, this extension: 6700). Encapsulation of data and readability with the classical format may just be too much of an advantage as opposed to the compactness this offers, especially on the long term.
I did a test: I opened the page archived with Save Page and the saved it again but with classic Firefox save. When I reopened that page, aside from the longer opening time, most of the images were lacking and much of the layout was somewhat off. Meaning, even if the visuals can be hardly distinguished, the more can the underlying logic from the perspective of the browser (and most likely from other html parsing tools').
So to sum it up, just as a non-professional in web-dev, I'm having doubts if html format was created for this kind of usage and if it can relatively fairly stand the test of time. For my application this tool, for the aforementioned reasons will not really suffice, nonetheless the engineering is astonishing. In the meanwhile I'm still searching for a tool that focuses its output in one folder and not a folder and a file as Firefox save does.
Developer response
posted 7 years agoIn reply to a couple of the points raised:
1) With regards to the saved file format:
The page source (HTML) and all of the referenced resources are saved in a single file (.html).
External CSS style sheets are converted to internal CSS style sheets. All other textual resources (scripts & frames) are stored as UTF-8 data URIs.
If the page loader is not used, all binary resources (images, fonts, audios, videos, etc) are stored as Base64 data URIs. In this case, if a binary resource is referenced multiple times, a Base64 data URL will be stored for each reference.
If the page loader is used, all binary resources (images, fonts, audios, videos, etc) are stored as Base64 strings in the page loader script, and are converted to blob URLs when the save page is opened. In this case, if a binary resource is referenced multiple times, its Base 64 string will be stored only once, resulting in much smaller saved files.
2) "When I reopened that page ... most of the images were lacking and much of the layout was somewhat off."
The reason for this discrepancy is that, when you saved the page with Save Page WE, you had the 'Use page loader to reduce file size' option enabled, which means all of the binary resources are represented as blobs.
Before using the Firefox 'Save Page As', you need to use the 'Remove Page Loader' menu item that is built into Save Page WE. Alternatively, you could disable the 'Use page loader to reduce file size' option before saving the page with Save Page WE. Either way, you should find that the re-saved page is pretty much identical to the original page.
1) With regards to the saved file format:
The page source (HTML) and all of the referenced resources are saved in a single file (.html).
External CSS style sheets are converted to internal CSS style sheets. All other textual resources (scripts & frames) are stored as UTF-8 data URIs.
If the page loader is not used, all binary resources (images, fonts, audios, videos, etc) are stored as Base64 data URIs. In this case, if a binary resource is referenced multiple times, a Base64 data URL will be stored for each reference.
If the page loader is used, all binary resources (images, fonts, audios, videos, etc) are stored as Base64 strings in the page loader script, and are converted to blob URLs when the save page is opened. In this case, if a binary resource is referenced multiple times, its Base 64 string will be stored only once, resulting in much smaller saved files.
2) "When I reopened that page ... most of the images were lacking and much of the layout was somewhat off."
The reason for this discrepancy is that, when you saved the page with Save Page WE, you had the 'Use page loader to reduce file size' option enabled, which means all of the binary resources are represented as blobs.
Before using the Firefox 'Save Page As', you need to use the 'Remove Page Loader' menu item that is built into Save Page WE. Alternatively, you could disable the 'Use page loader to reduce file size' option before saving the page with Save Page WE. Either way, you should find that the re-saved page is pretty much identical to the original page.