Open a .webarchive file on Windows, Android or any browser

What a web archive is

A .webarchive is what Safari saves when you choose File, Save As and pick Web Archive, and what some Mac and iPhone apps hand over when a page is shared. It keeps the page and every picture, stylesheet and font it used in one file, so the page still looks right years later. Only Safari opens one. On Windows, Android or Linux it is a file nothing recognises, and Word shows it as a screen of garbled characters.

Inside it is a property list, Apple's structured file format, almost always the binary kind. It holds the page's own bytes and address, then each resource the page loaded with the address it came from, and a whole archive of the same shape for each frame. AMBER reads that in this tab and rebuilds the page from it.

What it does to the page

• Everything saved is put back where the page expects it. Pictures, stylesheets, fonts, pictures inside stylesheets, imported stylesheets and frames are all rebuilt from the archive, each resolved against the address it was saved from.
• Nothing missing is fetched. Anything the page asked for that Safari did not save is left out and listed, because loading it from the internet now would tell the site that the page was opened, when, and from where.
• Nothing runs. Scripts, event handlers, javascript: links, plugins and automatic redirects are taken out. A saved page is for reading what was on it, and a web archive is a file somebody sent you.
• The .html it saves stays that way. It carries a content security policy that allows no network at all, so wherever it is opened later it cannot load anything or send anything.

What it cannot do

A page that builds itself with script after it loads, as many web apps do, may come out incomplete, because the archive holds the page as it arrived rather than as it looked, and the script that finished it is not run. Pictures that load as you scroll are put back when Safari had already fetched them. For a page that must look exactly as it did, the honest answer is a PDF made on the Mac that saved it.

To keep the page as a PDF from here, save it as one .html file, open that in any browser and print it to PDF. To check a link in it before visiting, PHISHLENS reads it without going there.