(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
Pleased to announce WRP version 4.5.2. This is just a bug fix release however it also contains two frequently requested features:
UI customization via HTML template file. This has been requested by many users and it makes total sense. To use it download wrp.html from github, place in the same directory as wrp binary and edit to your liking. WRP will load built-in version if file is not present.
This should enable easy development of more modern UI for never browsers. Potentially with JS and CSS. Please send PR if you make something!
Second most frequently asked feature – re-capture (retake?) of a screenshot without page reload. For example if the page did not capture correctly or if something is changing on the page.
I have also updated Docker Hub and gcr.io repos.
As usual please test and report bugs!
The next update will focus on issues with page size, viewport and rendering full length pages (h=0) which is currently very broken.
I like the idea of bringing modern web to old systems, and with WRP I think you did an excellent job. I dont know maybe you already see this but there is also similar solution by Action Retro to make modern web acceptable on old systems by simplifying the html page. Maybe there are things that can be adopted to improve compatibility. Here is the video link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_v2_vTogS8
Previous versions of WRP were doing something similar. However in my opinion it didn’t work too well for media and content rich sites and wasn’t very future proof with ever evolving HTML. I think rendering in to a clickable image is way more future proof. Just my opinion.
Can you add another screenshot recapture solution to the WRP? Because the St button stops the loading of the webpage and there is no option to recapture the website’s current state without stopping the loading progress of the page. Also can you add a JPEG option and quality control for improving the speed of WRP? It would be really awesome. By the way, this is a really nice software. I’ve tried this on a couple of old feature phone browsers that uses client side rendering (so the WRP is not working with Opera Mini and UC Browser, since they’re using their own proxy servers to compress and render webpages), and it worked really well. Just add those 2 things that I’ve mentioned to the next version to make it even better.
You really have to speed up the WRP, because it’s very very slow. Eric Mackrodt’s script is actually very fast, but it’s not compatible with many old browsers, just with Netscape (and of course, with the newer browsers) since Eric focused on the Netscape (because the Netscape Navigator has many different APIs compared to other old web browsers). If you fix the slow speed problem, it will be a huge improvement in WRP.
Well, the slowest part is encoding, decoding and transferring the GIF image. If you switch to PNG it should be way faster, if your client browser supports it. I’m thinking about few optimizations for GIF encoding that could be done on WRP side to make things slightly faster but it will never improve speed on the client. Also transmitting large image over network takes way more time than bunch of text. Finally a few seconds could be shaved off by removing pause before a screenshot is taken.