Comment on Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, their read-it-later and content discovery app, and Fakespot, their browser extension that analyzes the authenticity of online product reviews.

gerowen@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Wish they’d make bookmark not suck so much that using them felt like a commitment to organisationnal chores. The bookmark system is largely unchanged since the netscape days.

  You cant search texts inside bookmarks because they only store the url. Which will break. Instead of saving the html itself, as if we still only has hundreds of gigabytes.

  It should have a library level search system, capable of not just symbol text but intelligent summarization, categorization, search by relecant, content discovery algorithm, rss feed support all fully local, offline capable.

  The whole thing, metadata, html, inages, video, files, code, replay of the changes over time. Yes I should be able to replay clicking “read more” as I expand comments on facebook. I should not lose my work to a page reload ever again. And no that’s nor “too much space”. Web pages are largely text sent super efficiently it is not that much information even compared to a gigabyte.

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  • mr_satan@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    What you’re describing is so much more difficult from a technical standpoint than you give it credit.

    Static pages – sure, the plague of single page applications – oof, that’s a challenge.

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    • Feathercrown@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I’ve actually been thinking about this a lot. “Save Webpage” is useless nowadays because everything is loaded externally through scripts. What if it saved a timeline of requests and responses somehow and could play it back? This might require recording the entire JS state though… and so much more with browser plugins. Saving just the requests+responses as a cache would fail if the scripting was non-deterministic. Maybe it would make sense to literally save a “recording” of the HTML and CSS changes, playing back only the results of any network requests or JS?

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      • mr_satan@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        This would be a whole new pipeline to make interactivity work. Emulating a server with cached responses would allow to reuse the JS part of websites and is easier to do. I have no doubt that some pages wouldn’t work and there would be a shitton of security considerations I can’t imagine.

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    • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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      • mr_satan@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        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 required a full on web crawler and then not only loading saved pages and scripts, but also emulating the servers to fetch the data rendered.

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  • bufalo1973@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Now imagine having google, bing, qwant, duck duck go and ecosia bookmarked.

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    • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      You’d get a mostly empty page with a search box in the middle … and a few hundred megs of tracking software.

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