June 14, 2026
Web drama goes offline
Show HN: Kage – Shadow any website to a single binary for offline viewing
This app saves websites for offline reading, and the comments instantly turned into a nerd fight
TLDR: Kage is a new tool that saves modern websites for offline reading by freezing what you see and removing the moving parts. Commenters immediately turned it into a debate over whether it beats existing tools, could overload sites, and whether it’s basically old-school site copying for today’s web.
A new Show HN project called Kage promises a fantasy many internet users have had for years: save an entire website so it still works later, even if the original page breaks, changes, or vanishes. The pitch is simple enough for anyone to get: it opens a site in a real browser, waits for everything to load, then saves the finished page while ripping out all the code that phones home, tracks you, or leaves you staring at a dead loading spinner months later. In other words, it tries to make the web feel ownable again.
But the real entertainment was in the comments, where the crowd immediately split into camps. One person basically said, nice try, but SingleFile already does this better, kicking off the classic hacker tradition of turning every launch into a comparison showdown. Others were less interested in rivalry and more concerned about whether this thing could accidentally hammer websites with too much traffic, asking for speed limits, fewer images, and ways to grab only part of a site. That gave the thread a tiny ethical panic: cool tool, sure, but can it behave?
Then came the practical dreamers. One commenter loved the idea for company wikis in places with no signal, which is the least glamorous but most relatable use case imaginable. Another boiled it down to the question everyone was secretly asking: is this just wget for the modern, script-heavy internet? Honestly, that may be the cleanest summary of the whole debate.
Key Points
- •Kage clones websites for offline use by rendering pages in headless Chrome, capturing the final DOM, stripping JavaScript, and downloading assets locally.
- •The tool is intended to preserve pages that would otherwise break when saved conventionally because they depend on remote scripts or client-side behavior.
- •Kage can be installed via `go install`, prebuilt binaries, Linux packages, or a container image that bundles Chromium.
- •Its main commands are `clone`, `serve`, `pack`, and `open`, supporting local preview as well as packaging into ZIM archives or self-contained binaries.
- •The crawler reads `robots.txt`, seeds from `sitemap.xml`, supports scope and depth controls, avoids duplicate fetches, and can resume interrupted runs.