I am curious to hear opinions about the best Mac browser. I have been big on Brave for desktop lately, migrating away from Safari. I have been digging deep into EagleFiler this week, and I have discovered that webarchive files only open in Safari. I am considering migrating back to Safari for this reason, but I am reluctant to leave Brave. Does anybody have thoughts about this?
I’ve been using Brave myself as an alternative to Google Chrome, but there’s been some developments lately that I haven’t loved. They’re definitely pushing the whole sponsored-everything-bitcoin-whatever stuff more and more.
I always seem to come back to Safari. It does what I want, it doesn’t annoy me, and it doesn’t require a lot of thought. Seems ideal to me. YMMV.
Thank you for your perspective. I find I agree and have switched back to Safari.
Hi, I’ve just been looking at the options to store web pages to be managed in EagleFiler. I am not using webarchive because it is an Apple format that could be dropped by Apple at some time in the future. My preference is to store web sites as PDF which while a complex format is at least open and available across MacOS / Windows and Linux so offers some future proofing.
For what its worth I try to save all my files in the simplest format as a way of preserving my ramblings for the future - its is always worth remembering what happened to Lotus 123, WordPerfect5, Aperture, Deneba Canvas, RiscOS, TIALD (The Fat Slags) and many many other applications and systems lost in the great bit bin.
best wishes
S
I can definitely understand this perspective. PDF is certainly a good long-term, portable choice. However, I would also add that Apple has supported the Web archive format for 18 years now, which is much longer than abandoned formats like AppleWorks and Aperture. If it ever does drop support, that would not be immediate. The old software that can still read Web archives would remain available for a time and could be used to convert old files to whichever format is next. In that light, since the Web archive format preserves more of the original information than PDF, it is arguably more future-proof.
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I seem to recall (but may be I mis-remembering or mis-informed) that Apple recently did “deprecate” the web archive format? I figured that this probably started some sort of clock to the countdown of the webarchive format.
I haven’t seen that, but if you find a reference to it, please let me know. Safari still creates Web archives, and Apple recently added a new API for third-party applications to do this. The older API is now deprecated (because it has been superseded), so maybe that’s what you were thinking of?
I think most of my recollection stems from this thread on the MPU forum which does, now in hindsight, seem to be referring to that part that you mentioned, not the format itself, as well as the DevonThink forum which also mentions that Yojimbo has deprecated support of the format as well (which was my main use of Yojimbo back when I used Yojimbo, ages ago).
One of the DevonThink folks seems to think web archives aren’t as useful as they used to be, but doesn’t see them going away either.
If there’s no reason not to keep using webarchives, I would be very glad to know that.
I fully agree with what @Michael_Tsai wrote above: The .webarchive format might well become unsupported at some point in time in the future, but this time is not now, and there is currently no other format which is equally well prepared to preserve web pages with the whole bunch of different objects and element types that — unfortunately for archival purposes — web pages are comprised of nowadays.
If the web pages you have in mind don’t lose relevant information when converting them into PDF, do so. But if they do, I’d stick with .webarchive and hope for some even better successor to become available before .webarchive will eventually go away.
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