Saving a webpage to your computer can turn into a bit of a mess, particularly if you’re looking to save the page to your local machine. If you try using the “Save As” feature of your browser you’ll sometimes end up with an unwieldy collection of files or more content than you needed, depending on the browser and method used to save the page.Extensions can provide a better solution. Some offer selective page editing before you save, while others provide one-click convenience. Let’s have a look at three of the best page saving extensions for Google Chrome.
Cleansave
Apparently designed with the environment in mind, Cleansave is an incredibly handy extension for web content. Unlike most such extensions, this one gives you the chance to edit content before it is saved. Clicking on the Cleansave icon provides you with an editor that can change font size, remove images, or add notes. You can even selectively delete images and paragraphs.
Once done you can print the page. Or save it to PDF, email it, put it in your Dropbox or send it to Google Docs. The last two options provide you with the option to save it as a PDF file or a text file (optimized for use with Microsoft Word).
What’s the downside? The editor can be a bit aggressive in its effort to strip out page formatting, so pages will often be missing headers and won’t be saved with additional content (such as sidebars or unnecessary images). If you want to preserve the look and feel of a page, this isn’t for you. But if you want to simplify it for reading and printing, Cleansave is awesome.
SingleFile
The concept behind SingleFile is simple. Save any webpage with a single click to a single file. The resulting file is not .PDF or .doc either. It’s an HTML file that you can re-open in any web browser. In my use of the extension I’ve found it to be extremely accurate. What you see online is what you’ll see offline.
You can even save scripts, JavaScript objects and Flash along with the rest of the page, though the extension does not save them by default. This is probably because these elements can cause a page to become unstable if they can’t properly communicate with a server.
The only problem with SingleFile is its simplicity. You can’t selectively save content and there are only a handful of options available. What you see is what you get.
PageArchiver
This extension , which is the work of the same developer who made SingleFile, adds some additional functionality. It also lets you save webpages, but instead of reducing them to an HTML file the page is saved in the extension’s archive. From there you can revisit it at any time.
Folders are not supported in the archive, but there is a search function, which makes large collections manageable. Notes are supported, too – though if you are more concerned with note-taking than page saving there are better extensions for that job.
PageArchiver can export a webpage out of the archive. Although it does save the webpage as a single file, it places it in a zip folder before doing so, which is unnecessary. PageArchiver also tends to corrupt the file name while exporting by adding additional or non-standard characters, a small flaw not shared by SingleFile.
Conclusion
None of these extensions can be labeled the best. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, but more importantly, they all do what they’re supposed to. I searched through quite a few potential extensions but decided that only these three worked well enough for MakeUseOf’s readers.Still, the Chrome Web Store is one heck of a big place. If I missed a great extension that you like to use, let us know in the comments.
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