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Can it be used to render pages? That's still something I desire.

Yes. Either as screenshot images, or as full dom with readable text, even if text was js-written. That's the use-case that gets me hot-n-bothered, too.

Now if Google would use such a system for all their crawling, instead of forcing us ajax-app authors to implement their hackish hash-bang "solution." I'm guessing they would if they could, but the cpu cycles are just too expensive still.

The offscreen Mozilla branch I linked to above can. We use it for our private bookmarking/archiving site. Our headless Gecko drives the thumbnails and previews on qumbler.com.

(I originally wrote "delicious/pinboard clone" instead of "bookmarking/archiving site" but I realized we've had it since before del.icio.us launched.)

really? delicious was 2003; muxway, the predecessor was in 2001.

Like I said, private site, not productized at all. :) We have web-based group bookmarks going back to August 2002, and we have static records going back a few years before that. We starting archiving and versioning pages in September 2002. I don't see that we had tagging until sometime in 2005.

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