image - What is the best way to create a web page thumbnail?

Question

Is there some reasonably cross platform way to create a thumbnail image given a URL? I know there are thumbnail web services that will do this, but I want a piece of software or library that will do this locally. I guess in Linux I could always spawn a browser window using a headless X server, but what about Windows or OS X?

Answer 1

You can use Firefox or XULRunner with some fairly simple XUL to create thumbnails as PNG dataURLs (that you could then write to file if needed). Robert O'Callahan has some excellent information on it here:

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2005/05/rendering_web_p.html