I have come upon an interesting idea while working on something quite unrelated:
An addon for Kodi that can display a webpage as a PNG.
I am still letting the idea form properly, but the general concept is that there is an addon (or widget in the home window) that, when activated, grabs a webpage, renders it in memory, and converts it to a PNG to be displayed on-screen.
The web page would be constructed using the resolution of your screen (or skin), so it would fit perfectly horizontally on-screen.The user would be able to scroll up or down, and maybe cycle through pages by going left or right.
You could set the webpage URL in the Settings, along some settings like delay before converting to PNG, whether to enable javascript or plugins, the default size of the page, etc.
No need to exit to a browser just to check one page (like a blog you frequent often, or a reddit page like “todayilearned”, or just the first page of a new site).
Of course, you couldnt interact with the page, as it is just a picture. But sometimes all that is needed is a click and scroll.
It would require installation of a number of packages, so would only work in OSMC (rather than any Kodi install).
Edit: I know there is a webpage viewer addon in Kodi, but that just extracts the text from a webpage.
Edit2: Also, this would not be included in OSMC itself (there’s little point in that) but added on by the user.
Edit3: No matter what, I will be providing a guide to show how you can set up regular webpage snapshots via OSMC.