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I’m not talking about Calculus. This is a bit of hacking for everyman.

Of course there are occasions when you may be tempted to Save As… some embedded content you quite like on a web page. With many Flash animations and movies that is not as simple as right-clicking in the browser and saving the source. Of course, there is always, or usually, a way around that. Let’s take the example of a movie trailer from io9.

Before you continue: content on web pages may be copyrighted and may possibly have terms of use associated with it. Use your own judgement. Do you really need to keep all that stuff in any case? How often do you need to view that trailer?

Right-clicking the embedded content has little effect. Our way out is the browser’s cache – it generally downloads all manner of junk to speed up the experience of browsing the Internet. To ensure the content is cached, you may choose to first play the content, but that’s not always necessary. Finding the embedded content’s name is generally accomplished by floating the mouse pointer of the content and looking for some form of description. Else, use some text that hangs around the embedded content in question. Remember or copy that, then open the Page Source from the View menu, for Firefox. Search for that text and use some additional detective work to gather the information on the URL you’ll need. For example, a movie trailer may have the extension .flv. Remember that source URL for the search in the browser’s cache.

Finding the cache is not necessarily easy. So, we make our way to another resource: the URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) scheme supported by our browser. I use Firefox – open a new tab and enter the address about:cache.

The Disk cache device is of interest: simply click the link to see the content of the cache. Use the URL or part thereof to search the cache for the content you’re trying to get at.

That’s really it. With the URL in plain view, click on its link to get to the actual detail of the cached content.

The easiest is to right-click and Save As from the link shown. And that’s it!

There are certainly many tools to help with this simple task, but you may not always have them at hand. It’s a bit of magic you can impress someone with, I guess.

More information on the URI schemes here. For IE, try Internet Options and select the General tab. Under the section labelled Browsing history, select Settings and then View files.