Save Full Page may not save full page, but will save as visible

[amccombs]

FireFox 108.0.2 on Ubuntu 20.04LTS

I am attempting to Save Full Page on https://my.website-editor.net However, it will only save the same as Save Visible.

Attaching what Full Page saved.

[jscher2000]

Yes, this is a known problem on pages with interior scrolling. You'll probably notice the scrollbars within the screenshot. The Firefox screenshot feature does not have the ability to expand those regions to full height (or to put that another way, it doesn't have the ability to remove height restrictions on the page that force scrollbars on interior regions).

If you are a little bit familiar with HTML and CSS, then you can, on a case-by-case basis, use Firefox's Page Inspector (part of the Developer Tools, Ctrl+Shift+i) to work around this problem.

Start with the HTML tag at the upper left of the Inspector's tree display. Click that, and the Rules pane on the right should display the CSS. You can type height into the filter bar and turn off (uncheck the box in front of the rule) for any height or max-height rules that may be restricting the page height.

Repeat this check on the BODY element.

Unfortunately, some pages have various nested height-restricted elements, so those two might not be enough to resolve the issue.

It's possible there is an add-on which can do this automatically, but I haven't search for or tested any that claim to do it.

[amccombs]

Thank you, but that seems silly that Firefox needs to read the contents of what it is presenting instead of just saving of what is showing.  File > Save Page As saves what it is showing.

[jscher2000]

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@amccombs wrote:

Thank you, but that seems silly that Firefox needs to read the contents of what it is presenting instead of just saving of what is showing.  File > Save Page As saves what it is showing.

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Taking a screenshot is useful if you need to capture exactly what you see on screen. File > Save Page As saves the HTML code of the page to a folder on disk (and when you choose "Complete" it also saves images, scripts, style sheets, and various other bits and pieces of the page). The saved page isn't guaranteed to look the same as what you saw on screen, but it may be good enough in most cases.

[JohnBoyTheGreat]

Screenshots don't capture entire pages which do not fit on the screen. That's the entire point.

The "Web Page, complete" function is practically useless, except for developers, since it saves dozens or even hundreds of individual files, which is extremely inconvenient for most users.

All users want here is a visual depiction of the entire web page in a single image or a PDF file. That shouldn't be so hard to accomplish. The screenshot function can resize a page to all kinds of dimensions to simulate various devices in "Responsive Design Mode" (CTRL-Shift-M). It doesn't seem like it should be that difficult to develop a method of saving exactly what is seen on an entire page, based on that.

What is needed is simply something that captures the current view of the web page--including the portion that is hidden from view--and saves it to an image or PDF. That's it.

[jscher2000]

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@JohnBoyTheGreat wrote:

Screenshots don't capture entire pages which do not fit on the screen. That's the entire point.

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As mentioned previously, it depends on the design of the page. For example, you should get the full text of this longish blog post with Save full page:

https://www.jeffersonscher.com/ttw/2012/02/another-beautiful-island/

No?

[JohnBoyTheGreat]

I don't think anyone is arguing with you that SOME pages will appear correctly when saved using "Web Page, complete".

It's the MAJORITY of pages that will not that are the reason for this topic.

Also, the "Web Page, complete" save is garbage. It saves a whole slew of files, rather than a single file...which is not the ideal situation for most people. (Great for developers though...)

The old MAFF format or the common MHTML/MHT format would be great for saving pages but Firefox doesn't have those, and the existing solutions built-in to Firefox are embarrassing for those of us who love Firefox and defend it.

If Firefox won't save what a person sees EVERY SINGLE TIME (with few exceptions), then that feature in Firefox is not very useful.

[jscher2000]

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@JohnBoyTheGreat wrote:

I don't think anyone is arguing with you that SOME pages will appear correctly when saved using "Web Page, complete".

It's the MAJORITY of pages that will not that are the reason for this topic.

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This thread is about the Firefox Screenshots feature, not Save Page As. I can't defend Save Page As -- it goes wrong frequently. If you need to save a page as HTML with good fidelity, I suggest using this add-on which embeds the images and various other files directly into the HTML and solves the problems caused by using the companion folder:

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/single-file/