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
mr_satan@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
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.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 4 weeks ago
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