There's no replacement for ScrapBook, a plugin where I have a decade of stored annotated documents (no hyperbole, my oldest files date from 2007). Ever since I discovered that FF57 was going to kill ScrapBook I had to disable Firefox updates so I don't lose access to ~6GB of stored data. It's a mix of past, present, and future writing research.
I know I have access to clumsy workarounds such as copying FF56 to a VM with updates disabled, or to have parallel Firefox installs, but Scrapbook is a daily-use tool for me, and clunky workarounds won't last long.
I'm thinking about reverse-engineering the way ScrapBook stores data so I can write my own migration to something else, but...oof.
Anybody have any suggestions for another plugin/product that offers the same features? Or, dare I dream, one that can import everything from ScrapBook? My searches for the latter have come up dry, but perhaps something obscure exists.
It will remain updated through April 2018 and your profile will stay separate from your installed copy of Firefox. In April, ESR is switching to a newer Quantum version of Firefox, so old extensions will be disabled. If, at that point, there isn't a suitable replacement for ScrapBook, disable updates in your copy of Firefox Portable (if you're using the PortableApps.com Platform to automatically update it, rename your FirefoxPortableESR folder to FirefoxPortableESROld or similar) and only use it for ScrapBook not to go online.
Scrapbook, that takes me back. Haven't used it in a dog's age. But I would be enormously surprised if it did no longer store saved content under your Firefox profile directory, and back when I used it, it just saved the files there and maybe did some link rewriting. Not really a lot of importing necessary to view the content outside the extension - you'd just need to point a browser at its file:// URL.
Not sure how much that helps in terms of retaining the actual functionality, which unless I'm badly mistaken would only be feasible in the WebExtensions API via the external application messaging interface - and you'd need a separate program that would receive those messages and do the mirroring for you, and maybe expose a local HTTP server or some other such horrible hack to let you fetch the content tree for rendering in the browser as a table of contents/tree of bookmark-style links. But at least you might not have to lose what you've got.
Today I spent some time looking at how ScrapBook stores information. It's a bit of a mixed bag, with some plain text files, some XML, some HTML (besides the saved pages themselves). I managed to figure out how it stores folder structure, bookmarks, saved pages, and annotations. Fortunately there's no database, and no encryption, so I can write a tool to extract the information if needed.
The remaining question becomes: how to replace it? What other tool supports all this?:
* Local saving (as opposed to cloud)
* Storing source URL with support for re-fetching
* Bookmarks (for pages that won't save locally in a useful way, such as YouTube)
* "Deep saving," saving the main page AND linked pages, and keeping them bundled together
* Full text search
* Probably other features I do not recall offhand
Even if I can get the data out, it's hard to know where to put it. Most solutions these days are cloud-oriented, which is unappealing to me. I could build my own stand-alone replacement, but what a headache. I could fork ScrapBook and try to make it work with the latest Firefox, but I have no experience in the plugin domain, nor the time to prioritize learning it.
Sorry for the rant, I'm just trying to figure out how to proceed without severe productivity loss.
I'd look at the Zotero standalone, but that's just an offhand guess. Other than that, I got nothin' - except 52 ESR, which is good for security updates until some time next year, and won't get the breaking changes from 57.
> I'm thinking about reverse-engineering the way ScrapBook stores data so I can write my own migration to something else, but...oof.
Looking around on the ScrapBook website[0] reveals that "gomita", the author of the plugin, has a GitHub profile[1]. Sadly without a repository of ScrapBook source code. Still, you could try contacting gomita and ask if they want to put it there to help with reverse engineering it? Or maybe even document how it works.
Losing several hundred thousand users¹ probably isn't in the team's best interest; so hopefully they will make it a priority to revisit this, but I have a feeling there are resource limitations that will make this by design won't fix.
I can relate to this, tho for me it was TiddlyWiki(-legacy), and UnMHT
you can use the ESR[0] release with the extension AND disabling auto-update, and use -no-remote paramater to run multiple instance FF...
So in your case, you can have two instance, one FF running ScrapBook, the other is new-and-shiny FF... I used this setup daily with multiple FF running at my whim, didn't feel clunky
p/s: ScrapBook sounds awesome, I myself did saves PDF version of website, where it still can be indexed/searched properly
Not to my knowledge, but you can use the LTS version of Firefox. Which if I remember is still compatible with older plugins. It will be a year before Mozilla refreshes with the newer branch.
It won't last that long. The current ESR version of Firefox is 52. It will be switched to 59 at the start of March 2018, and 52 will be completely discontinued in June 2018. That's a little over 3 months until it becomes annoying to get a copy of, and a little over 6 months until it's dead.
"Or, dare I dream, one that can import everything from ScrapBook?". Let's hope dreams are answered. You can add me to that probably long list of hopefuls who have huge records of online life in scrapbook for pre-57 Firefox.
It’s been a long time since I used ScrapBook. I don’t know about anything that can import from it either.
I wanted to suggest Zotero as a tool to capture information of different kinds. It’s a multi-platform tool that also has “connectors” (extensions) for different browsers. [1] It may probably not be a complete replacement for ScrapBook.
At this point it would be best to start exploring other notetaking extensions and programs, like OneNote, Evernote, Zotero, etc. Now is the time to jump ship because from here on in it will get more and more unlikely that any viable bridges will remain compatible.
The other option is to look at some of the PDF printing add ons because I remember a few supporting batch operations on scrapbook data. At least they did in 2010-ish.
I know I have access to clumsy workarounds such as copying FF56 to a VM with updates disabled, or to have parallel Firefox installs, but Scrapbook is a daily-use tool for me, and clunky workarounds won't last long.
I'm thinking about reverse-engineering the way ScrapBook stores data so I can write my own migration to something else, but...oof.
Anybody have any suggestions for another plugin/product that offers the same features? Or, dare I dream, one that can import everything from ScrapBook? My searches for the latter have come up dry, but perhaps something obscure exists.