this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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We can save entire operating systems in that way, the heavy burden is borne by the hardware, as far as the software is concerned it is to dump the memory snapshot of the engine into a file and reload it later.
I mean, it's been almost 30 years and this aspect hasn't evolved because of a long expired belief that we will be able to re-download it all later as if the internet wasn't eventually going to churn over and all links will eventually break.
Ok, so your average site doesn't download content directly. The initial load is just the framework required to fetch and render the content dynamically.
Short of just crawling the whole site, there is no real way to know what, when or why a thing is loaded into memory.
You can't even be sure that some pages will stay the same after every single refresh.
Comparing it to saving the state of OS isn't fair because the state is in one place. On the machine running the code. The difference here is that the state of the website is not in control of the browser and there's no standard way to access it in a way that would allow what you're describing.
Now, again, saving rendered HTML is trivial, but saving the whole state of a dynamic website require a full on web crawler and then not only loading saved pages and scripts, but also emulating the servers to fetch the data rendered.
It could crawl elements within the DOM to save a word cloud of visible text for each bookmark as metadata for later searches. I think it's doable. Separating nonvisible and visible stuff is very difficult though.
This is supported, but not integrated in bookmark lookup. I mean, if you hit ctrl+s, the browser will save currently rendered HTML. No crawling required. Hooking up some text indexing for search seems perfectly doable.
I understand a VM isn't the same since at least it is somewhat self-contained.
But at the end of the day, a browser does end up showing you something and has a stable state waiting for your input. These stable moments are like checkpoints or snapshots that can be saved in place, the whole render engine state machine. And that can be saved at multiple times, similar to how internet archive takes periodic static snapshots of websites.
It should be trivial, a one-click action for the user to save the last couple of these checkpoint states to a format that can be consulted later and offline or after the website has gone. Whether that's just saving "everything" it needs to recreate the machine state, or by saving only the machine state itself.
That doesn't mean the whole website will remain interactive but it will at the very least preserve what was inside the scroll buffer of the browser
And that is a LOT better than just saving a broken link, or just saving a scrolling screenshot, which already would be an improvement over the current state of things.
It would also allow a text search of the page content of all bookmarked pages. Which would be huge since the current bookmark manager can barely search titles and very poorly at that.
The bookmarks system is long LONG due for a full overhaul
This "machine state" definition and manipulation is exactly the hard part of the concept. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it's a beast of a problem.
Our best current solutions are just dumb web crawler bots.
To me a simple page saving (ctrl+s) integration seems like a most realistic solution.
I mean the engine already has a full machine state. I could just run firefox inside a VM and snapshot the VM to save the website in a idle-disconnected state. So it's a matter of doing something more sane and efficient than this