What reviewers see when a page will not load

A canvas shows the live site, not a picture of it. Notemark loads the page through a proxy, so reviewers click real menus, scroll real layouts and pin comments on the actual elements. That is the point of the product, and it covers most pages.

Some pages cannot be loaded that way, and pretending otherwise would leave reviewers staring at a broken frame. This post covers which pages those are and what Notemark shows instead.

Pages the proxy cannot load

• Pages behind a login. The proxy does not sign in to your site, so a dashboard or account page comes back as the login screen.
• Local development sites. localhost, 127.0.0.1, *.local and *.test run on your machine. Notemark cannot reach them, and the canvas says Running on your machine instead of timing out.
• Sites with bot protection. Some sites block the proxy outright. The canvas shows Site Protected.
• Sites that do not answer. A site that is down or refuses the connection shows Loading Timed Out or Failed to Load, with a Try again button.

A site's own 404 page is shown as normal, so a missing page looks the same as it does in your browser.

The extension sees what the proxy cannot

The browser extension runs in your own browser, with your own session. It can comment on a page behind your login, on localhost, and on a page in a state no URL can reproduce, like an open cart or a modal. Comments still match the page across different ports, so localhost:3000 and localhost:5173 land on the same canvas page.

When someone comments with the extension, it also captures a screenshot of the page as they saw it.

The fallback reviewers see

When the proxy cannot load a page but someone has commented on it with the extension, the canvas shows the latest screenshot captured on that page, labelled with when it was taken. If that page has none, it falls back to the newest capture on the canvas.

So a reviewer who opens the share link for a logged in dashboard does not get an empty frame. They get the page as your teammate saw it, with the comments pinned where they were left, and a timestamp that tells them how fresh it is.

A canvas keeps captures for up to 20 pages. Capturing a page again replaces its previous screenshot, so the fallback is always the most recent view of that page.

Where to go from here

• Install the browser extension on any page the proxy cannot load.
• Add the embed toolbar to sites where reviewers should comment without installing anything.
• The troubleshooting guide lists every message a canvas can show and what to do about each one.