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Published 20 hours ago • verified publisher icon webrecorder

unable to replay imported HAR files

Open jakewarren opened this issue 3 years ago • 3 comments

Description

HAR files appear to be imported successfully but when I attempt to replay them the page is blank. Inspecting via devtools, no HTML content is returned in the response and not seeing any errors in the console.

Environment

HARs captured with:

  • Chrome 97
  • Firefox 96

Steps to Reproduce

  1. In the browser, open the devtools and browse to a webpage. Once the page has loaded, export the content as a HAR.
  2. Go to archiveweb.page, create a new archive for testing purposes.
  3. Import the HAR into the archive then go the Pages view. You should see the page was imported along with related metadata (timestamp, title).
  4. Open the page to attempt replay.

jakewarren avatar Feb 02 '22 17:02 jakewarren

Just wondering, is there a particular requirement to use HARs? Is it to be able to archive from Firefox or other browsers?

The issue with HAR is that it's more intended for perf metrics rather than full archiving, and so browsers often drop the response if it is too big, or when you navigate to a different page, and maybe other conditions - and the export only contains the headers and the timings, and usually there's not a way around that. This makes sense as JSON is not great for storing large binary data.

The main reason I could see for using HAR is to archive from a browser that does not support the extension but does support HAR. Not saying that there couldn't be another issue, but just HAR hasn't been a priority given these other issues and that recording directly generally works much better in Chromium based browsers.

Do you have a HAR file you could share?

ikreymer avatar Feb 02 '22 18:02 ikreymer

For me personally I have some old HAR archives that I used to be able to replay with replayweb.page (unsure when it stopped working). I am with you on WARC being a better format for archival, I started using archiveweb.page for creating archives once I became aware of it. I could see other users capturing HARs from Firefox or other browsers but I do not know how popular of a use case that is.

Here's a couple of example HAR files: example 1 example 2 it is pretty quick to generate more using the steps I provided if needed.

jakewarren avatar Feb 02 '22 19:02 jakewarren

If it is a one-time conversion from HAR to WARC, you can try uploading the HAR to Conifer and download as WARC.

(I used it to capture with Firefox.)

despens avatar Apr 10 '22 07:04 despens