Is there a way to get the current position within a web page, so that I can later scroll back to that position?

Add-ons Development
#1

How can I mark where I am in a long web page so that I can quickly return there later?

I would like a browser add-on that would help me in the following two ways:

  1. When I am reading through a long web page, I would like to mark my location. Next time I return to that web page, it would automatically scroll me to my previous position.

  2. Some online ebooks have a home page containing a table of contents with links to the individual chapters or sections. When I’m in one of those chapters, I would like to mark my position. Next time I go to the home page (table of contents), I would like it to automatically take me to the chapter page and scroll me to the position where I left off reading.

Is there such an add-on? Does the WebExtensions API give me the capability to write this myself?

#2

You can use scrollX, scrollY, and relatives - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3791336/why-were-window-scrolly-and-window-scrollx-introduced

#3

You could also use anchor elements and some javascript…

@bwh,

Have you tried pocket? I’ve been toying with the idea of making addons for the pocket website myself, maybe its something we can collaborate on.

#4

You can certainly use a WebExtension to scroll pages, but managing the scroll positions and finding the correct times and pages to scroll will be far from trivial.

On a site note: Leaving tabs open and restoring them on the next start has your desired effect (not per URL, but for that tab). Firefox 55 has massively improved the startup performance of sessions with many tabs. I currently have more than 500 tabs open (in the session, not nearly all of them are actually loaded) and Firefox starts in a matter of seconds. If you need to reduce the RAM usage of Firefox while it is open, there are a number of add-ons that can unload tabs (I maintain one myself).

1 Like
#5

I think pocket is a great place for bookmarks but it needs more ways to share, mark up, and write notes for web on pages. I talked about this with the project lead of Echoburst during mozsprint 2017, I suggested Pocket to him so that he could organize information but he said he needed added features in order for it be useful for him.

It wouldn’t be easy, but it would be a great add-on for pocket. Of course their are add-on’s out their for note taking (at least the last time I checked) but not one styled and design like @bwh is talking about …

It is something I would like to play with building using the dev-tools api that came packaged with FF56 (The most recent stable).