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My goal is to save (mobile) webpages so that I can comfortably read them offline in iOS 14 on an iPhone. So far I've tried:

  1. Asking the Safari reading list to save them offline, making sure to enable automatic saving for offline use in Safari settings. Unsurprisingly Safari doesn't save the items in my reading list, which results in lots of unusable entries (and a useless feature).
  2. Saving the mobile page as a PDF through the system screenshot feature. The resulting PDF is just cut off at some arbitrary point making it impossible to read e.g. a long article. This happens both in reading mode and ordinary page PDFs. Unusable.
  3. Saving the page as a .webarchive with Safari. This is the best alternative so far, but when I open the archive in Files I can't interact with the preview of it, making e.g. expandable sections unusable (one example is mobile Wikipedia article sections), and I'm not offered to open it in Safari (!) This also prevents me from using Safari's reading mode on it.
  4. Saving the reading mode page as a .webarchive. Doesn't work — it just saves the source page, i.e. same result as #3.
  5. Adding the actual .webarchive to Safari's reading list instead of to the Files app when asked where to save the archive. Unsurprisingly the reading list can't even save the page for offline use when handed the archive on a silver platter like this...

How can I open my .webarchives in iOS Safari?

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  • #3 works perfectly for me
    – Thinkr
    Commented May 20, 2023 at 7:56
  • @Thinkr That regrettably gives us little information leaving out which part of #3 works, and iOS version. Are you suggesting I try something again?
    – Andreas
    Commented May 21, 2023 at 1:46
  • Well I'm just saying that #3 works for me; I can download the webarchive to files and see it as a normal webpage where I can click on links to open them in my default browser (Safari in this case). See apple.stackexchange.com/a/459758/489896 for screenshots of it working for me and what I did in case you've done differently.
    – Thinkr
    Commented May 21, 2023 at 5:54
  • And, yes, maybe try again following the steps given in the above comment (with link). Also, what are you doing to get the web archive?
    – Thinkr
    Commented May 21, 2023 at 5:55
  • @Thinkr In #3 I'm trying to convey that the preview is static; Wikipedia sections won't expand — they still won't in iOS 16. I can't see a mention of iOS version in your linked answer. While following a link is technically "interacting" with the preview it's kind of defeating the point since I'm now navigating away from the webarchive entirely, making it irrelevant.
    – Andreas
    Commented May 21, 2023 at 10:06

1 Answer 1

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I was really disappointed that there appeared to be no way to do this on iOS…
so I made an app:

Web Archive Inspector

The app decodes the web archive and attempts to activate any JavaScript it finds. There's an item in the menu to ‘Inject JavaScript’ which also forces external JavaScript resources (where the original response was saved in the archive) to be executed too, still supporting offline.

It's not 100% but I've tried it with the collapsible sections on Wikipedia mobile you mention in the question and it works great for me! Let me know in Ask Different Chat if there's a favourite site of yours that doesn't work and I'll look into it.

Download on the App Store for free.

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  • Nice idea! I tried it out and it works well in Wikipedia as you say. I assume based on the effort that you're fairly certain that it wasn't already possible. I found one archive that consistently results in a crash, and I can't view its info/address without actually opening it. The SE chat functionality feels very foreign to me and I avoid using it, but I can send it some other way if you wish.
    – Andreas
    Commented Mar 11, 2022 at 13:34
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    @Andreas Feel free to email any webarchives that don’t work to apps@ the domain name of the first link in the post and I’ll try to figure out what’s wrong.
    – grg ♦
    Commented Mar 11, 2022 at 18:03

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