ArchiveWeb.page is a browser extension for Mac that lets you capture live web sessions directly into portable, standards-compliant WARC and WACZ archive files — no server required.
What is ArchiveWeb.page?
ArchiveWeb.page is an open-source archiving tool that embeds a full web crawler inside your browser, recording every request and response as you navigate — turning an ordinary browsing session into a self-contained, replayable snapshot. It was built by the Webrecorder project, the same team behind professional web archiving tools used by libraries and digital preservationists worldwide.
Unlike screenshot tools or PDF exports, ArchiveWeb.page captures the actual network traffic: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, fonts, and dynamic API responses. What you get back is a WACZ file — a zip-based package that any Webrecorder-compatible player can replay offline, with full interactivity intact.
What does ArchiveWeb.page do best?
It excels at capturing pages that conventional tools simply cannot — JavaScript-heavy SPAs, paywalled articles you have legitimate access to, social media threads, interactive maps, and anything that only exists as a live DOM after client-side rendering fires. One of my favourite use-cases: preserving a lengthy Twitter thread or a Substack post before it disappears behind a paywall. I open the page, click Record, scroll to the bottom, and stop. Thirty seconds later I have a portable, replayable archive.
- WACZ output — the modern, indexed successor to raw WARC; smaller and faster to seek through
- Offline replay — drag the WACZ into replayweb.page and browse it as if the site were live
- No cloud dependency — everything happens locally; your captured content never touches a third-party server
- Auto-crawl mode — queue pages and let the extension work through them without babysitting each one
Is ArchiveWeb.page free?
Yes — ArchiveWeb.page is entirely free and open-source, released under the AGPL licence. There is no paid tier, no subscription, and no feature gating. The Webrecorder project is largely grant-funded and community-supported, so donations are welcome, but nothing is paywalled.
Who should use ArchiveWeb.page?
Journalists, researchers, and lawyers who need to preserve online evidence are the obvious audience, but I use it just as often for personal knowledge management — capturing documentation pages before a library releases a breaking version, freezing a forum thread whose author has a habit of deleting posts, or archiving a recipe site buried in 47 ad popups. If you depend on web content that might change or vanish, ArchiveWeb.page belongs in your toolkit.
The one caveat is that it requires Chrome or a Chromium-based browser (Brave, Arc) to run as an extension. Safari users are out of luck. Firefox support is partial via a separate distribution. For Mac power-users who already live in Chrome or Arc this is a non-issue; for Safari loyalists it means keeping a secondary browser around.
What are the best ArchiveWeb.page alternatives?
The closest Mac-native competitor is SingleFile, which saves a page as a single self-contained HTML file — simpler output, but no dynamic replay and no standard archival format. HTTrack is the old-guard offline site ripper, but it is a command-line tool with no live-session recording. Hoarder and Raindrop offer bookmark-plus-snapshot workflows but their snapshots are server-side screenshots, not interactive replays. For true WARC-level fidelity ArchiveWeb.page has no real rival in the browser-extension space.
On the professional end, Webrecorder's own Browsertrix (a cloud crawler) handles large-scale multi-URL crawls, but it is a hosted service with per-crawl costs. ArchiveWeb.page is the free local version of the same underlying technology.
How does ArchiveWeb.page compare to Wayback Machine?
The Wayback Machine is a public archive you query after the fact; ArchiveWeb.page is a personal tool you operate in real time. Wayback cannot capture paywalled pages, logged-in views, or content that was never publicly indexed. ArchiveWeb.page can capture all of that because it rides inside your authenticated browser session. The two are complementary rather than competing — I often check Wayback first and fall back to ArchiveWeb.page when a snapshot is missing or too stale.
