Automatic requests and different icon color for archived pages
As far as I understood the extension only checks WayBack Machine on request, but it would be nice if the extension could check the loaded web page automatically and get statistics available. To save traffic this option can be configurable.
Also, it would be nice to have a different color for icon in toolbar if the page already in archive, for example green color for archived pages.
Interesting.
I imagine that with a feature such as this, an end user might forget that so much traffic is generated. (Does the Internet Archive set a limit on what can/should be done with Wayback Machine APIs?)
My greater concern would be privacy e.g. the risk of inadvertently checking URLs of sensitive pages.
Side note
Wayback Everywhere may be of interest. The same concerns re: traffic and sensitivity of information however with this extension, use of the Machine is unmistakable.
Thank you for the feature request. It's an interesting idea. I've received a number of similar requests over the last two years. There are a number of reasons why I'm not planning on adding this feature at this time.
-
Privacy As mentioned by @grahamperrin, a feature that automatically submits the URL of every page you visit to the Wayback Machine for checking or archiving could have a major impact on the user's privacy.
-
Extension Permissions By design, the extension can only get details about the user's current tab when the user clicks the right menu link or opens the popup. For the extension to be able to automatically submit URLs, it would need the tabs permission, which would give the extension access to the details of every tab the user has open.
-
Upcoming changes to WebExtensions Back in October, the Google chrome team published a blog post detailing some of the changes they are planning to WebExtensions to improve security and privacy. Until I know more about these upcoming changes, I do not want to spend time developing a feature that may need to be totally rewritten or removed all together.
Trustworthy Chrome Extensions, by default (Chromium Blog) https://blog.chromium.org/2018/10/trustworthy-chrome-extensions-by-default.html
There are a number of browser extensions that let you automatically archive pages. None of them are available from the chrome web store, so you would need to manually download and install them.
https://github.com/kissarat/never-lose https://github.com/Jacket-Chan/auto-archive-extension
https://github.com/kissarat/never-lose is only for chrome and wasnt updated since 4 years same for https://github.com/Jacket-Chan/auto-archive-extension
Maybe it would be nice to have a list of domains that you can add as automatic saves? I guess the problem with that is you really don't necessarily want people adding gmail.com for example to that list, and you can't prevent that from happening
save all/black- whitelist option but for many privat things which could be archived you need the exact url so it shouldnt be a problem