I don’t like it when I go back to a tab and it reloads.
For whatever reason, I want tabs to stop changing. I don’t want the to reload from their javascript and I don’t want the tab content to be deleted by the automatic discard (to save memory)
If firefox decides to free memory, it should dump tab data and tab state to disk, not delete and reload from the website later.
Sometimes the website won’t exist later.
Somewhat related but this one is hard : Some website dynamically delete content after you’ve scroll past it (firefox) this means even if you scroll to the “true” bottom, you can’t ctrl+f search and you can’t freeze the page and read it all at your leisure and preserve it for later.
Currently my solution is to video screen capture the whole tab while scrolling slowly, this is quite a ridiculous step to take but apparently the only option to keep our data !?
Instead of making a video you could probably print to PDF
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I tried a page like a closing facebook group and it printed like 2-3 out of 90+ pages.
I had some success with shareX scrolling screenshots but sometimes it glitches out too.
I think some kind of proxy and “full stream replay” is going to be needed. If only firefox could record a tab as if it were a virtual machine save state.
While it might be reasonable to expect a web page to behave the way you describe, for anything more in web application territory the expectation that everything you ever loaded will stay visible somehow and available without cooperation of the code implementing the website is ridiculous.
Browser in a VM and a smart enough caching proxy should do.
Especially the narrow case of scrolling up and down the page. That could be scrolling down and disable the erasing of the data, then freezing scripting when it’s all in the scroll buffer.
Press F12 - choose the console tab, type “debugger” and hit enter. If that doesn’t stop everything, a “console.break()” may also be needed.
Edit: This looks promising: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/javascript-toggler/
Looks great but I wish for more. Per site pause points and skip point. Short circuiting certain functions, per site.
If you don’t mind learning a lot of JavaScript, a Script monkey style Solution can do this for you.
Narrator: They did not wish to learn JavaScript and were looking for an easy answer even if it didn’t exist.
Not for this reason, but I use Singlefile to save pages to a Single HTML file with the original formatting, maybe that’s what you are looking for. Basically it discards the tab to disk. When you reopen it later, it won’t be interactive anymore, though (maybe certain settings can help with that).
Added bonus is that this way you are making archives for yourself. The files are often relatively small. I have set it up to download to a subdir of Downloads, and set that dir to compress files so that it’s even smaller, and from time to time I repack all of them into a 7z file where their size is really negligible.
Other than that, I don’t know of a way to basically “hibernate” a tab. That would be pretty cool to do, though.
Interesting ! I have tried single file before for explicit archival, it worked well.
Is there a way to makes tabs automatically discard to singlefile and restore from singlefile ?
Hmm, I’m not sure.
I think you can set up automatic saving of tabs, but that is probably not what you are looking for, but also it will be in the way while the process is ongoing for the current tab.
Other than that, I think I have read that it can be controlled from other addons, like starting a new save, so maybe you could make a simple addon that can decide when to trigger saving a tab, then unload the tab and replace it’s URL with the result of the singlefile save.