SingleFile is amazing - use it tens of times every day across desktop and mobile. Can’t recall a single instance of it breaking. Thank you sincerely for your excellent work.
SingleFile just makes this one really complex, really important thing trivially easy, and in a portable format. For anyone curating a knowledge base it’s an absolute godsend.
I didn’t see any donation instructions on your GitHub - I for one would certainly love to chip in if you could point me in the right direction?
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/android/addon/single-file/
[2] https://apps.apple.com/app/singlefile-for-safari/id644432254...
[3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kiwibrowse...
That said, Monolith's approach of not requiring a web browser could be a game changer for simpler projects or where installing a Chromium-based browser isn't viable. It strikes me as a more straightforward, lightweight solution, albeit with the clear trade-off of not supporting JavaScript.
Has anyone run into situations where one tool clearly outperformed the other in real-world usage? I'm particularly curious about the impact on performance and convenience when choosing between these two, especially for mobile use. Also, kudos to the authors and contributors of these tools. The tech community benefits greatly from such innovations that help preserve and share knowledge.
Anyway, to answer your question, lots of pages need JS to work correctly, so using Singlefile is the better option.
What do?
I use SingleFile to save a copy of every article / post / SO & forum discussion I find interesting or useful. I sort them into two buckets: work, and not-work.
I’ve been doing this for 10+ years (before SingleFile I used things like .pdf, plain .html, .webarchive files - although these all have drawbacks).
In the pre-LLM era, I would then interface with these almost exclusively through a search front-end. I use Houdahspot on Mac and easySearch on iOS. That lets me see everything interesting I’ve read on a particular subject just by typing it in (with the usual caveats that apply to basic keyword search - although in practice that alone has proven very effective). Because it’s just a folder of essentially zipped .html files, there’s no lock-in.
Now that we’ve got LLMs, I plug those 10+ years of files straight into my RAG pipeline using llama-index. It’s quite nice :)
Also, how is the quality of the output generated compared to a .pdf? I'm used to print PDFs from chrome for articles that I want to save, but the layout can become awkward sometimes, and navigation bars can appear several times and hide portions of the text.
I like this feature from chrome, but it's not consistently reliable.
The output compared to PDF is like night and day. It is high Fidelity versus low Fidelity. At this point now, I only use PDF if for some reason I need it
In most cases SingleFile outputs looks identical to the real thing. Though I generally only use it on simpler sites such as recipes and technical blogs.