Is there a recommended way to ‘save a webpage’ in Brave? – i.e., a method that preserves the appearance of the webpage as closely as possible to the original?
Is ‘save as a PDF’ the most common way to do this?
Thanks.
I would say it depends on your intended purpose.
Writing it out to a PDF might certainly work for certain situations. Or you could do a screenshot of the whole thing (either thru an extension, or using the appropriate function in DevTools). And there’s also the ‘Save as → Webpage, complete’ option. The last one I haven’t used in a long time, but as I recall it will save the HTML as well as embedded images and so on, and rewrite the links in the HTML page so they point to the local copy. This way you can have an offline copy of the site more or less verbatim.
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Thanks.
► Primary Intended purpose:
– A URL for a news article that I sent to someone is displaying an ‘unsafe’ warning on their device (not on mine, not even in TOR).
– I was asked to create a PDF of the article and send that instead.
– I noticed that the normal way I’m familiar with to create a PDF from a document (Print > Save as PDF) is not previewing the full webpage that the article is on and is displaying some odd formatting in places, so I wanted to know how a PDF could be created that would display the entire webpage (not just the article and some, but not all, of the graphic elements).
► Secondary intended purpose:
I’ve never understood the ‘Save as → Webpage’ option. When I’ve tried to use it, it’s always created a slew of separate files. Selecting any of them from a file selector dialog (or clicking on them) never seems to open a replica of the saved webpage in a browser.
So I would like to know how to do that.
Yes, it’s not perfect, but it generally works pretty well.
Generally you’d expect it to save something like this:
You would open the .html file. The HTML file itself has links/references to copies of the web page which are in that folder, and it loads them from there instead of from a web server.
If you wanted to distribute this to someone else, maybe you’d want to Zip it and send them the Zip file.
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Thanks. It’s occurred to me that if something about the webpage is causing the warning message to appear, wouldn’t ‘sending the webpage’ as an email attachment have the same result when opened by the recipient who’s getting the warning?
Or is the webpage, when received that way, completely ‘offline’ (therefore inaccessible to an Internet intruder)?
Also, are DevTools likely to be understandable to ‘regular users’?
This is the error message the other party is getting (that I don’t get):
"Your connection is not private
Attackers might be trying to steal your information from xxxxxx.com (for example, passwords, messages, or credit cards). Learn more
NET::ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID"
Try singlefile
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/singlefile/mpiodijhokgodhhofbcjdecpffjipkle?hl=en
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Hard to say. There’s lot of security policies out there, some of them useful, and some of them silly. I’m surprised they weren’t even able to view your original attempt at sending a link, although there could be many reasons for it. Depends on why and how it got blocked really.
I think everything would be loaded locally and not reach out to the Internet for anything at all. I could be wrong about that but I’m pretty sure that’s the case. So in that sense it would be extremely unlikely that the pages/documents/files could end up being malicious, unless the original site is somehow malicious and assuming they weren’t modified in transit somehow (e.g., someone intercepts and tampers with the attachment before it gets to the other person).
We’re also assuming they are permitted by their security policy to receive and download Zip files, and then open local HTML documents. Hard to say what their policies might look like.
This is how you’d use DevTools to capture the page, and it would save it as a single, simple image file.
Note that you’d use the ‘full size’ option if it’s more than 1 screen length that you’d need to capture.
So this is what happens when they try to open the link directly? With everything we’ve discussed until this point, figuring out why they can’t just open the link might be the easiest path. But without knowing the exact site it will be hard to say why they’re getting that issue. All that said, that error message is eerily reminiscent of an error many Chromium-based browser (Brave, Chrome, Chromium, etc.) were getting recently when they had out-of-date local certificate stores on their computers. This mainly affected people running Windows 7 as well as older versions of macOS. Might be worth seeing if that’s their situation.
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Come to think of it, if you want to go the ‘full web page saved as an image file’ route, I have found this extension to be very handy for that: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gofullpage-full-page-scre/fdpohaocaechififmbbbbbknoalclacl?hl=en
It’s more or less the same as the DevTools ‘full size’ capture, but easier to use.
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Thanks, @JimB1.
What I couldn’t understand was why I wasn’t seeing the error messages the other party was getting – with any method of attempting to access the webpage (i.e., whether from links in an email or directly at the website). All access attempts worked without issue for me, whereas all returned warnings for the other party.
The possibility of an ‘expired certificate’ was raised but if that were the problem it seemed to me I should experience the same issue. I received no ‘warnings’ of any kind for either the website or the article, including in the TOR browser (used to compare with results in Brave).
The other party’s ISP is Earthlink. I don’t know anyone else who uses Earthlink anymore so maybe that has some relevance.
The website in question is: unherd.com.
Indirect link to the article: https://unherd.com/?s="Bret+Weinstein" (The article is easy to spot. Top row.)
Direct link to the article: https://unherd.com/2021/11/the-liberal-case-for-gun-ownership/
The other party (not a ‘computer person’) expressed fatigue and didn’t want to do any more drilling down so I just PDF’d the webpage and sent it before seeing your replies. I used FireShot but will try the methods you mentioned (as well as SingleFile, mentioned by @scavxo) to compare results.
Thanks again.
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Yeah, based on what you’re telling me now I’m almost certain they’re having the issue I referenced above.
In short, it stems from sites that used LetsEncrypt-issued certificates, where the root CA certificate that signed the web site’s cert was expired. That root CA cert expired on something like Sept. 30 and people all over the place started having issues with Chromium-based browsers, IF they were on older OSes (such as Windows 7) that either didn’t provide updates anymore, or if they had shut off auto-updates, etc. etc.
I can’t imagine your correspondent isn’t having issues with tons of sites. If they’re interested, they can look at this for solutions. For users encountering NET::ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID Error
The site you linked uses the IXRG Root X1 CA, which is the typical replacement for impacted sites… lending even more probability to it being that issue.
Firefox and maybe a few other niche browsers were not affected because they install their own root CA certificate storage, rather than the operating system one.
Anyway moving on from there: glad you got it working. I used to use FireShot on Firefox and I remember it being excellent, it’s a good tool. The thing I like about the GoFullPage extension is that it doesn’t request any intrusive permissions, it’s pretty safe to have it installed and only use it when you need it; and until then it basically does nothing (and cannot because the permissions don’t allow it to).
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I haven’t received an answer yet from the other party re how frequently the issue is occurring, so am waiting on that and to see what interest there is in fixing the issue, and will then proceed from there.
I didn’t have the impression that the problem was occurring a lot, if at all, with other webpages/websites.
The computer in use is an old Mac, but running El Capitan, a recent OS. I’ve asked whether auto-update is active or not and suggested turning it on if it isn’t.
Many thanks again, also for the additional information about GoFullPage.
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