Snapshot of web page will not show in Firefox

yngve

I am collecting daily snapshots of newspapers' Facebook pages for research purposes. However, the snapshots I saved today and yesterday will not show in Firefox. They appear in a short glimpse the second I load them, but then all the content disappears and the blank Facebook frame is all that is left. I am able to open the snapshots (as almost unreadable html versions) from my library on Zotero.org, so the content seem to be saved, but somehow I can't get them to show as web pages in Firefox anymore. Any suggestions?

dstillman

By "in Firefox" you mean when opening from the Zotero application, or are you still using Zotero 4 for Firefox?

If you're still on Zotero 4 you'd want to upgrade as a first step, but snapshots of JavaScript-heavy web applications like Facebook ultimately just aren't going to be very reliable, and we're planning to switch to simplified, reader-mode-style snapshots in the future (at least as the default, though it's possible full snapshots could remain an option).

Zotero 5 uses the "Save Page As…" functionality from Firefox (which it's based on), so you can compare the results to using "Save Page As…" from Firefox itself. If Firefox does better, we might be able to improve this, but if it's the same then probably not.

To save something like a Facebook page, saving to a PDF is likely a better option, since it won't depend on the JavaScript on the page continue to work in a local context. There are also other browser extensions that use different saving methods that you could try. (On a technical level, in theory it seems like a tool could save the rendered DOM and computed style and then throw out any JavaScript, so that you'd have a page that was totally static but that always worked locally, but it's a pretty hard problem.)

yngve

Thanks for your answer. I am using Zotero 5.0.45, so there should be no need to upgrade. I have now tried "save page as ..." from Firefox, but it looks terrible as html. Do you have any suggestions as to how I could save a long webpage as a pdf? That might be the final solution here.

adamsmith

re PDFs: Nothing automated with Zotero, but you could try which of the many print webpage to PDF add-ons works well https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?platform=windows&q=PDF and then do that & drag the PDF to the Zotero item.

dstillman

On a Mac you would just do it from the Print dialog. In Firefox, with the options to print background colors and images, it does a decent job of saving a long Facebook page to a PDF. (You have to scroll in the page first to load any content you want.) I don't know what the options on Windows are.

yngve

Thanks! Seems like Pdf Mage does the trick - links work within the pdf as well. That said, it is sad that Zotero cannot handle these kinds of web pages anymore, when it has been working perfectly for years. But I guess it is due to recent changes in the Facebook interface or something.

bwiernik

@dstillman Windows 10 also ships with a Microsoft Print to PDF print driver installed.