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I am trying to restrict the user from downloading the page as .html or .aspx file from browser.

Or is there a way to change the content of file if its downloaded?

Shahid
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  • Does this answer your question? [How to prevent downloading images and video files from my website?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1294501/how-to-prevent-downloading-images-and-video-files-from-my-website) – Dharman Jul 15 '21 at 18:18

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This is a complex area, with lots of moving parts. The short answer is "there is no way to do this with 100% success; there are a few things you can do which make it harder".

Firstly, you can include JavaScript to disable the right click context menu. This doesn't stop Ctrl+S, but might discourage casual attempts.

Secondly, you can use DRM in the browser (though this is primarily aimed at protecting media content. As browser support is all over the show, this isn't realistic right now.

Thirdly, you could write your site as a single page web application, and build some degree of authentication into the "retrieve content" logic. This way, saving the page to disk wouldn't bring the content along, just the "page furniture". However, any mechanism you include to only download content when you think you should is likely to be easily subverted by anyone who is moderately motivated.

Also, any steps you take to stop people persisting your pages locally are likely to break the caching mechanisms on which the internet depends for performance, so your site would likely be dramatically slower.

Neville Kuyt
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No you can't stop them.

Consider how the web actually works here: once the user has visited your website and loaded your page into their browser, they have already downloaded it - the web page was transmitted from your server to their computer and appeared on their screen.

All they have to do then is click the Save button to keep it permanently on their disk. That doesn't involve downloading it again, it just copies the page data from a temporary folder to a permanent one. Of course it's also possible for people to use another HTTP client (i.e. not a browser, but maybe an existing program, or some code they wrote themselves) to visit the URL of your page and save the returned contents.

It's not clear what problem think you would solve by stopping people from saving pages. Saving the page is something done within the browser - you as a site developer don't control the user's browser, so you can't prevent that. And if you stop them from downloading your page in the first place then - by definition - you also stop them from using your website...which kind of defeats the point of having one :-).

If you've got some sort of worry about security, you'll have to clarify exactly what you are concerned about, and maybe you can get advice about a sensible way to deal with it.

ADyson
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