Feature: save or cache page

[Matthew Exon]

Browsers normally include some way to save a page, including all CSS, JavaScript and images necessary to show the page correctly. This would be good in the Touch web browser.

Justification:

I would argue that saving web pages for later viewing is even more important on a mobile device than a computer. On a computer you can reasonably just leave the browser open if you want to do something else and come back to it later. On a phone the browser risks being closed for lack of memory, and you have no control over that.

Furthermore, on a computer you normally have continuous internet access, so it's easy to go back to the page later. On a phone you are frequently drifting in and out of good reception, so you may not be able to reload the page precisely when you need it most.

For example, there's a webpage with a map showing an address, but when you get there you're in a notspot. Open your browser to where you left it and you briefly get to see a fuzzy version of the map, which then immediately gets yanked away from you!

My personal need is when I'm travelling. I like to save wikitravel/wikipedia pages of the place I'm going, hotel pages, booking receipts and so on. It is normal that when I first arrive in a city I have no SIM card, let alone 3G. At the moment my solution is to use wget --page-requisites in a terminal to download the page, then run Apache in a chroot to serve the pages back to the browser. This is fiddly and unpleasant.

A traditional save/load style interface with a file chooser dialog might be nice. I think better would be an option in the hamburger menu to "cache" the page, similar to bookmarking but it keeps a copy of the entire page. Or you could save on UI surface area by always keeping an entire copy of any page that's bookmarked.

My fantasy solution would be the above plus a dbus interface. That would allow, for example, an itinerary app to automatically figure out which country/province/city I'm going to and pre-download relevant pages.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

For an offline page cache, see bug #1268055.

For saving pages to disk, in theory this should be made possible with the work being done to enable downloads within the browser (see bug #1354391). This will still require a way for the user to request saving a page (maybe an entry in the drawer menu?). Adding an ubuntu-ux task to get design to comment on this.