OT: Firefox: scheduling/automating copies of webpages

Sep 03, 2017 5 Replies

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Allan 9 years ago

Longshot, I know, but there's a wealth of knowledge here.

I've been using Page Saver from Pearl Crescent to take screen dumps of webpages for a while and been very happy with it. You can click and save from the menu the add-in provides inside Firefox. Info:

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Page Saver also has/had a command line option for Firefox. This was really useful for timed/unattended copies of webpages in Firefox (running from Windows Scheduler and a batch file to call Firefox).

However, old XUL/XPCOM add-ons have stopped stop working with Firefox, and Firefox probably won't be continuing command line capabilities to their WebExtensions implementation. Firefox announced their decision to stop supporting XUL based addons:

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Firefox has a really nice --screenshot command in its Developper Tools (which would be great as it's an internal Firefox command) but I couldn't find a way of automating/scheduling it, nor calling it from a batch file.

I'd really like something for Firefox where one can automate/schedule copies of a specified url (unattended), preferably using Firefox so it grabs the whole page and not just the visible window etc. Any thoughts/suggestions?

TIA

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Information here may be outdated?

Jeff Layman 9 years ago

There are a lot of FF users unhappy at losing their favourite "legacy" add-ons. If there isn't going to be a WebExtension for Page Saver (or a suitable alternative,), have you considered trying one of the FF forks such as PaleMoon or Waterfox to see if they work with Page Saver?

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Allan 9 years ago

[snip]

Thanks for the useful thought. Last I heard from the developpers of Page Saver, they had built a Web Extension version of the software, but as they said: "it seems unlikely that Mozilla will add command line capabilities to their WebExtensions implementation"

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Harry Bloomfield 9 years ago

Allan explained on 03/09/2017 :

If I understand what you want, there seem to be a few which do screen capture - take a look at Nimbus Capture. It includes a delayed capture.

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Brian Gaff 9 years ago

Is there anything stopping you using an older version of Firefox for this? Also Mozilla can be quite accommodating if enough people ask for something, sadly though you usage sounds quite niche to me. Is Greasemonkey still supported, maybe there is some route via that route.

Brian

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Allan 9 years ago

For what it's worth (& answering my own question), I've found a solution that would appear to work and will let me capture web pages from the command line (& thus scheduled). I'm still working on it. The solution I'm probably going to be using is: SiteShoter by Nir Sofer

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I've been using a few programs from this site on and off and I've always liked them (& no connection with the website other than as a happy user)

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