I am thrilled to share that our colleages at Harvard Law Library Innovation Lab (LIL) who run the Perma.cc service have recently switched to using ReplayWeb.page as the default replay system for all Perma.cc archives! Read the announcement on their blog.

ReplayWeb.page provides a fully browser-based viewer / web archive replay system with a variety of embedding and customization options.

ReplayWeb.page includes a number of replay fidelity improvements, and Perma.cc users should see improved replay across the board. The new system also simplifies the replay architecture by allowing web archives to be loaded directly from Perma’s cloud-based storage. For added security, Perma.cc replays WARC files in a separate iframe that is only accessible from a Perma.cc URL.

Perma.cc has a large archive of single-page WARC files and ReplayWeb.page will download and index the WARC file on first load. Since Perma.cc captures a single page at a time, this is generally very performant with most of their archives. ReplayWeb.page supports both WARC and WACZ replay, allowing Perma.cc to easily experiment with using WACZ files, should they wish do so in the future.

Perma.cc continues to be a pioneer and early adopter of the latest Webrecorder tools and technologies, and we have a long tradition of working together! In 2014, Perma.cc was one of the first adopters of pywb system from when it was barely in alpha!

In 2019, Perma.cc switched to a customized version of the then-current Webrecorder stack (which still powers the Conifer service). Over the years, Perma.cc developers have also contributed to various Webrecorder open source tools, supported collaborative development efforts, and contributed to important research around web archives and security, including the WACZ signing specification.

I look forward to continuing our long-standing collaborations!

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