Diffs

Differences between WebScrapBook and ScrapBook X

Here's a quick review of key differences of WebScrapBook (0.70.0) and it's predecessor, ScrapBook X (1.14.7).

Improvements

• Cross platform support: besides Firefox Desktop, Chromium-based browsers and mobile browsers (Firefox for Android, Kiwi browser, Yandex browser, etc.) are also supported. Added markings in a captured page can be viewed normally with most browsers, including mobile browsers and those without WebScrapBook installed. Fulltext search for generated static site pages is available without browser configuration in prior.

• Remote access: remote access of scrapbooks from multiple devices is supported, as long as a backend server is properly configured.

• Multi-tab capture: select multiple tabs to cature at once.

• More customizable capture features: support capture options such as link, remove, save current, and save used for images, media, styles, etc. Support capure options for style images, favicon, canvas, embed, object elements, shadow roots, etc. Support pre-processing of captured web page using the capture helper(s).

• More flexible save format and data structure: ID of the captured page is based on UTC and captures from different timezones won't conflict with each other. A web page can be saved as different patterns of filename, such as datetime, title, source domain, UUID, and can be saved in a subfolder. A web page can be saved as a ZIP package (HTZ or MAFF) or single HTML file.

• More flexible scrapbook: an item in a scrapbook can be a child of multiple items. A deleted item from the scrapbook is put into the recycle bin for better security. Cross-scrapbook item locating and fulltext search is also supported.

Limitations

• WebExtension framework used by WebScrapBook is more restricted than XUL/XPCOM used by ScrapBook X, and some features are not natively supported and requires a corresponding backend server, leading to suboptimal performance, such as organizing the scrapbook(s).

• Features that are technically implementable but not yet done:

  • In-depth capture
  • Re-capture
  • Item sorting
  • Copy item information (CopyPageInfo add-on)
  • Capture automatically (AutoSave add-on)

Compatibility

Data structure of ScrapBook X is different from WebScrapBook and cannot be used in each other directly. Conversion is available using the conversion tool of PyWebScrapBook.

As the data structure is more flexible in WebScrapBook, conversion from ScrapBook X to WebScrapBook is lossless, but some information may lose after conversion from WebScrapBook to ScrapBook, such as:

• item appended to multiple parents (preserve only the first occurence)
• item in the recycle bin

Also note that compatibility validation of this tool is targeting ScrapBook X, and there may be minor compatibility issues if the output scrapbook is used by a legacy ScrapBook implementation without features introduced by ScrapBook X, such as:

• note pages
• container item whose type property is not "folder"
• file with special or non-ASCII chars in filename