Upgrade Storage(Automatic) bookmarking and annotation WITHIN web pages
When you later return to a page you had scrolled down in FF, the browser often returns you to the point you scrolled to. This is a useful behavior for researchers because we often read long pages. However, when you click the "View" button for a saved web page in Zotero, you always land at the top of the page. Could Zotero always return you to the last point you were at when you view a web page item, snapshot, or link?
Even better would be some additional functionality, similar to that provided by services like Diigo, that would allow highlighting and sticky notes to be place within web page items that you've saved in Zotero. The "Note Tool" and "Highlighter Tool" in Adobe Acrobat would be a great model for this. Annotations should be saved in your Zotero DB under the web page, link, or snapshot items and would ideally appear automatically when you visit a previously annotated web page, even if you did not load it by clicking through your Zotero library.
Is this a likely enhancement in the near future?
Even better would be some additional functionality, similar to that provided by services like Diigo, that would allow highlighting and sticky notes to be place within web page items that you've saved in Zotero. The "Note Tool" and "Highlighter Tool" in Adobe Acrobat would be a great model for this. Annotations should be saved in your Zotero DB under the web page, link, or snapshot items and would ideally appear automatically when you visit a previously annotated web page, even if you did not load it by clicking through your Zotero library.
Is this a likely enhancement in the near future?
If you follow a link to a named anchor and take a snapshot of the page in Zotero, it will save the link with the # part, and if you click the original link in the right pane, you'll return to the same spot. Zotero doesn't currently append the named anchor to the URL of the local snapshot (what you get with the "View Snapshot" button), though it could and possibly should.
I assume you're talking about the Back/Forward behavior, though, which is a bit trickier. Firefox itself only does it for items in the cache—not, for example, for bookmarks, which is the closest parallel to snapshots. We could save the pixel scroll position on unload, which is presumably what Firefox does, though for pages with flexible layouts the position would be off if your window was a different size from when you saved the page and the text had reflowed. We can consider this if there's demand for it, but I think it might be hard to implement in a way that wasn't really confusing/annoying for some users.
Highlighting and in-page annotations are high on our list of major upcoming features, though they'll take some work to implement well. Showing highlights and annotations on the revisited page itself rather than on the snapshot is a bit tricky, since you run the risk of the page having changed, but it's an interesting idea—we'll keep it in mind as we work out our implementation.
Thanks for the feedback.
Re: named anchors in snapshot URLs (and in web page item URLs?)- sounds good!
Re: Automatic scroll position saving - could you build in a window size check and return to the same pixel scroll position only if the window size hasn't changed since record save/last open? This functionality should be pretty reliable if FF is maximized and the monitor isn't changed.
Re: Possible annotation problems on original web pages. How about this workaround: Annotations are only possible on snapshots, but whenever you visit a web page that you have an annotated snapshot of, Zotero will alert you by showing a button that you can click to go to the annotated version (even when the Zotero window is closed).