Being sort of a boutique coffee fan, I usually save pages from a vendor as a web archive as small roasters don’t have the bandwidth to archive all their web pages … I guess.
I notice my folder of coffee saves … Safari will not now open the pages … definitely saved as web archive and not html.
Is this, lack of functionality, something new? …
I’ve got the same problem with Safari 18.6 on Ventura. I can still create web archives via File > Save As > Format: Web Archive, but when I try to open it, I just get a blank page.
Can we narrow this down to a Safari version, independent of macOS version? Such as: always works on Safari 18.5, never works on Safari 18.6.
Note: This doesn’t help in opening previously saved Safari web archives, but it is possible to create web archives in Firefox that can be opened by Safari:
- Save As > Web page, complete: Saves the page as an .HTML file and a separate folder with assets.
- Save Page WE extension: Saves the page as a single .HTML file, that internally contains all the assets.
Works with Safari 18.6 (19621.3.11.19.1, 19621) on Sonoma 14.7.7 (Apple Silicon)
Fails with Safari 18.6 (18621.3.11.19.1, 18621) on Ventura 13.7.8 (Intel).
I tested on Ventura with all Safari extensions disabled.
Rumor is there are other reports of this problem in Apple Discussions.
You might already know about this…but a (last resort or fallback) way to view legacy webpages and websites is archive.org .
Could it be a permissions problem?
For example, sometime in the last couple of months, I lost the ability to preview an HTML file from BBEdit in Safari. I needed to grant full disk access to Safari in the “Privacy & Security” section of the System Settings to get it to work again.
My current observation is similar
Safari Version 18.6 (18621.3.11.19.1, 18621)
On Ventura
I am go to migrate these files to my cloud and attempt on my Sequoia system … but that version of Safari seems the same.
Also to note. The file I was trying to view is a 7mb file. But even the Source tab In Web Inspector show zero data it’s a blank … in fact it literally shows the grayed out words about:blank on the blank display
is this a file security thing?
I know sometime you get an “unidentified developer” when saving web archived complete
Not an answer to your question, but when I have a web page I want to keep, I use Safari’s Export as PDF function (which is not the same as the print PDF function.) It preserves the look of the page, and hyperlinks remain clickable. (You may have to scroll pages that use script-driven progressive loading to get the whole page.)
.webarchive is an Apple-exclusive thing, but PDF is a well-supported format.