Oh, let's see.
Same old same old.
It's my contention that the browser should save a copy of every page you look at on the web. The whole page should be saved on your hard drive.
Will your hard drive capacity by quickly exceeded? I rather doubt that's an insoluble problem.
I just saved an article from The Huffington Post - a page with several photos - and the files occupy 2.7 Megabytes. 2,700,000. Ten of those = 27Mb. 100 = 270Mb. 1000 = 3Gigabytes. 10,000 = 30Gigabytes. I'm not sure how big the hard drive on this laptop is, but it's definitely more than 30Gigabytes, and 10,000 pages is a lot of pages. It's 100 pages a day for 100 days.
Is this going to solve every problem by itself? What problems does it solve by itself?
1) It'll conserver internet bandwidth ... if you want to look at a page more than once.
2) It creates an off line resource.
3) No question about it, there are pages you will never see again if you don't save a copy. The page you looked at, in a lot of cases, will cease to exist and will never exist again if you don't save it. True, this is probably only the case on the margins, most of the time. If you go back to the same URL, a fair amount of the time it actually will be the same page, and in a lot of other instances it will be mostly the same page ... but there are definitely URLs that will, after quite a short time, such as a day, show you almost a completely different page, or, at any rate, a substantially different page. After a month the two pages might be completely different, or almost completely different - same format, same title line, all new content, for example. And you simply cannot get the old version back.
Is that important?
I think it is, and that's all that matters.
I'm pretty sure a lot of people, including most experts, are going to say this is a stupid idea, and they'll advance various arguments to support that assertion. They will say it's not technically feasible, although that sounds so silly they just might not. Then they'll say most people can't even start to manage that many saved pages, so saving all of them is basically useless, and thus stupid. I guess to reply to that I need to demonstrate that it is possible to usefully manage large collections of pages - without being a super-genius. I think I can do that, although, granted, it's a little hard to think about. Well, I think, behind these bogus sounding "can't be done" type arguments there's something the naysayers would rather not talk about: they don't want you to keep their web pages. They even don't want you to keep any web pages. Why? Because it would shift the balance of power away from them and towards you. Can't have that!
That last thing can be described as a question of fairness, that's true. They worked hard to create a page, and now you get your own copy for free. Maybe they're counting on you to come back to their page, register another hit for them, look at their latest ads. They'd like you to link to their page on the Web if you want to share it with someone, and one implication of the idea that you will have your own copy is, maybe you'll just send someone a copy of your copy - or worse, maybe a copy of your own edit of their page (which is sort of a whole other giant, super-important topic).
I am for fairness. Actually, I think most people are. Having your own copies of pages, and being able to create and share your own edited versions of those page ... but you will need tools to do this, and fairness can be built into those tools. Let's say you privately share something from a page that you saved, and then let's say the origins of that thing are clearly presented to whoever you shared the page with ... that's called fairness. You could go further and incorporate the creator's advertising into what you share ... that's fairness. I mean, fairness is a two way street. If I show you something, and maybe ask you to look at some ads to make it an exchange, but then after a few moments I snatch it away from you and say you can't look at it again, is that really fair? I suppose it might be ... but it's not entirely decent.
Let's all try our best, and without letting people push us around, to be fair and decent, and I think things will be OK. I don't think it's actually necessary to tightly restrict the average person's control over their lives, over life in general. I don't feel like I'm being unfair proposing ways to give more people more control over their experience of Web content. To some extent, if you put something out on the Web, you don't have the right to snatch it back again. You asked us to look at it, and now you somewhat take your chances what we'll do. Fair is fair.
OK, then, what about the question of what you are going to do with all your saved web pages. When you accumulate a lot of content, looking at that content again becomes a challenge. Or, is that really true? Maybe people who say that are just being ninnies. Here's a very basic mechanism: the browser could show you your pages as a slide show. You could just watch one page after another appear on your screen, in your browser window - your saved pages - until you see the one you want. It's not a complete solution, and there are lots of other simple things that could be implemented, that would also help, but at least it saves you having to click hundreds of times to review your collected pages, which may sound like a small thing ... but isn't.
