Did Apple deliberately break .webarchives?

[Shamino (David C.)]

Right-click on a page and select “Take Screenshot”.

Then select the region of the page (regions appear to be based on the page’s DOM layout) or request a snapshot of the whole page. Then either save the result or copy it to the clipboard.

[ace (Adam Engst)]

Could you create a Zip archive of four or five of these sites, put it in Dropbox or another file sharing site, and then post the URL here? (I’m assuming these are public sites that don’t have logins.) That way people could check your specific webarchives and perhaps compare them against new ones to see if anything changed.

[fblondiau (Frédéric Blondiau)]

Did you try to open them with wkEdit (on the AppStore)… if it works there, you would even be able to edit them.

[jmhbpc]

working on something soon.

[jmhbpc]

I used web archive inspector which basically actives what File > QuickLook can render.

Funny aside, I found web archive inspector via google search link. If I type “web archive inspector” in the search bar at the App Store, I cannot find it

8-|

[Nalarider]

@macguyver

I use the PDF method, although it is not always a simple thing depending on the browser and other variables (I often use the Print Edit WE add-on). Firefox has a “screenshot” feature that can take the visible portion or entire page, but this creates a long, vertical image file that is not always easy to view

Slightly off-topic but related, this forum had a discussion in Dec. 22 that included using Print Friendly to get complete and cleaned-up PDF versions of web pages. I use Print Friendly quite often and it’s free.

[mwarhurst]

I wonder if there is any connection between this issue and that of pdfs not opening, which has ben discussed in the last week on Eclectic Mac & Howard Oakley has even written an app to fix the problem: Fix documents that won’t open as expected using Quarant2 – The Eclectic Light Company

[IzvorMusic (David Bilides)]

For whatever it’s worth, my oldest webarchive is from 2016, and I just opened it no problem. Running Tahoe 26.5.

Good luck!

[tidbits22 (Greg)]

Dated 2007. Not helpful buttons. What I want open it effects be damned? What’s '“Done” mean?

I couldn’t open it with TextEdit or Nova. Same message.

Same result for another old .webarchive.

They do “open” in QuickLook. But copying didn’t work. Screenshot might, but that wouldn’t capture the links. Clicking on links from QuickLook works. Can’t copy links though via right-clicking.

I suspect I quit using webarchives years ago because they were flaky. I now tend to use print to pdf. Can be ugly with complex webpages, but pdfs seem pretty bullet proof.

macOS 26.5.1

I haven’t read all the replies, so maybe I’m missing something.

Good luck.

[jajvj1 (Jeffrey Jones)]

Could somebody having this problem try the following?

In Terminal, cd to a folder containing some of these problem webarchives. Type:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine *.webarchive

Years ago, I had a similar problem with some webarchives, and for unknown reasons they had apparently acquired a quarantine attribute.

[gingerbeardman (matt)]

.webarchive files are just zip files, right?

You can use Keka unarchiving app to extract them. So at least there is no data loss.

But the fact these are all blocked by gatekeeper seems very peculiar. Are you in the habit of running any software that might be modifying low level system things? eg. Cocktail, Onyx, Mole, Clean My Mac, etc.

[jmhbpc]

Which sort of raises a question on whether Gatekeeper is simply “being” hypervigilant or if newly assessed, previously undetectable, issues have arisen … probably unlikely … more likely Gatekeeper just not recognizing things as trustworthy.

[Simon]

@jmhbpc

more likely Gatekeeper just not recognizing things as trustworthy.

Unfortunately, this is indeed a more widespread issue.

Last Week on My Mac: Why is it so hard to open a document?

[Dafuki]

@Simon

Unfortunately, this is indeed a more widespread issue.

Indeed, it is.

Sidenote: Bless Howard Oakley! A world treasure!

We’ll see whether they’ve done anything about this in Golden Gate but I suspect, given all this odd behavior over the last few years, that they really need to restructure the whole local file security apparatus no matter how many $millions it might take. So many legacy things that worked fine before but now are making a noxious stew.

Dave

[Will_M]

@Dafuki

We’ll see whether they’ve done anything about this in Golden Gate […]

Adding a new bell or whistle is sexy. Fixing an existing problem is not. I hope and do not expect.

[jmhbpc]

Per Adam’s suggestion, here is a Dropbox link to a zip archive containing two web archives from 2020 that no longer test valid for opening.

Dropbox

1. Largely Forgotten Osage Murders Reveal A Conspiracy Against Wealthy Native Americans _ NPR 2.webarchive
2. Putting Osage women in control of their own images - The Washington Post.webarchive

Ironically item 2 did not preserve images

Here are current live links

https://www.npr.org/2017/04/17/524348264/largely-forgotten-osage-murders-reveal-a-conspiracy-against-wealthy-native-ameri

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/putting-osage-women-in-control-of-their-own-images/2018/11/21/68abade6-ed02-11e8-8679-934a2b33be52_story.html

Technically the Post article might require a login, but I think as a webarchive it should open as a file in Safari.

That’s about what I can provide at the moment, I can work on other uploads at some point if helpful.

I can also try to find some webarchives that are not linked to accounts logins, if recommended.

[jmhbpc]

this is happening now with PDFs ??

[david_blanchard]

@jmhbpc

Per Adam’s suggestion, here is a Dropbox link to a zip archive containing two web archives from 2020 that no longer test valid for opening.

I downloaded this and I get the error you have been getting. I also tried “Open With…” and selected TextEdit and got the same error. However, if I opened TextEdit and then used the Open… menu it would open correctly.

A check of quarantine status:

dob> xattr -l Largely\ Forgotten\ Osage\ Murders\ Reveal\ A\ Conspiracy\ Against\ Wealthy\ Native\ Americans\ _\ NPR\ 2.webarchive
com.apple.FinderInfo:
com.apple.lastuseddate#PS: tK8j
com.apple.metadata:_kMDItemUserTags: bplist00�XYellow
5

com.apple.quarantine: 0083;6a384b1d;Safari;2B5BFF7F-02B2-4E4C-85B2-8263C3AE0CEE

And this removed the quarantine:

dob> xattr -d com.apple.quarantine Largely\ Forgotten\ Osage\ Murders\ Reveal\ A\ Conspiracy\ Against\ Wealthy\ Native\ Americans\ _\ NPR\ 2.webarchive

as shown by this followup:

dob> xattr -l Largely\ Forgotten\ Osage\ Murders\ Reveal\ A\ Conspiracy\ Against\ Wealthy\ Native\ Americans\ _\ NPR\ 2.webarchive
com.apple.FinderInfo:
com.apple.lastuseddate#PS: tK8j
com.apple.metadata:_kMDItemUserTags: bplist00�XYellow
5

com.apple.provenance:

So, now the question is why are these files being quarantined?

[jmhbpc]

Aside from … a lot of things, … here’s what I don’t quite get.

The resulting quarantine reference points are mostly just generic identifiers (I think)

• the file is noted as quaranined
• the file’s creation date code
• originating app
• file identifier/locator

Seems, however, nothing to indicate “reasoning”, so to speak, with regard to the quarantine.

Doesn’t this sort of imply that there are other markers, signatures? in the file that … are essentially out of date, expired, or otherwise unverifiable or recognizable, “suspicious” perhaps.

… … overy my pay grade

[xdev (Marc Z)]

@jmhbpc

Doesn’t this sort of imply that there are other markers,

Quarantine just means Apple can’t verify where the file came from. If you downloaded it from the internet, copied it from another Mac, unzipped it from an archive, etc. it might be flagged. Quarantine does not mean there’s anything suspicious or wrong with the file, just that’s unknown.

If these are your webarchives, there’s probably nothing wrong with them. They are just old and unknown, and somehow got flagged. Just turn off the quarantine bit on them and they should work fine.