Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread
My issue with this is that a good chunk of the older tabs end up pointing to 404 errors. I wish it were possible to load the version that was cached when I first visitted a given page, like a local Wayback machine( I also wish that were more aggressive about pulling in pages ...).
Then there's Amazon letting vendors reuse product codes so some pages end up pointing to things I know I've never looked at before and would never try to save like so.
It's nutty that we haven't had a proper offline mode in like 20, maybe 25 years. This was something every browser had in the 90s. Loading from cache was the default, even. Now it's like, I'm not sure why Firefox even has a cache folder. They bend over backwards to prevent you from using it.
Before you tell me that Firefox has an offline mode, yeah, I know. It's basically useless.
I would love a way to have my browser automatically store a local, static copy of everything I view.
If you're into selfhosting there is an alternative self-hosted Wayback machine.
Or you can use something like wallabag
And there is also a Firefox extension that let's your download a whole web site as a single html file .
Finally, there's Linkding who recently add local copy of your bookmarks.
Maybe with tab unloading Firefox doesn’t use a ton of resources for a billion tabs. But my 6 core Mac mini chugs with the way I browse the net. A freshly loaded session vs a “well used” one is like 20% CPU and 16+ gigs of ram. Maybe a fully specced out Mac Pro wouldn’t notice but this 8th Gen. i5 cries in pain.
There was a time when my computers would beg me for a mercy kill, but these days, not so much.