As you noted, problems playing videos and Lottie files in Make Image from Web Page are caused by basically the same underlying problem: limitations with the macOS web browser engine that the node uses to render web pages.

We recently tried a few more experiments in search of a relatively quick fix or workaround. But there really doesn't seem to be one. The node renders the web pages to an offscreen window and then turns the result into an image. There doesn't seem to be any way to trick the browser engine into playing Lottie animations when rendering to an offscreen window.

You asked about outputting an image vs. outputting directly to a window. If literally all you want to do is display the webpage, then you can use the Open URL in Browser node (and Lottie animations will work). In contrast, outputting to an image makes it possible to integrate the image with other Vuo graphics and to interact with the page within Vuo. Outputting directly to a window would not be noticeably faster, since macOS would still be internally rendering to an image that it provides to the window manager.

Coming back to the main question of the bug report — We'd have to investigate further to know just how difficult it would be to get around the limitations currently in the Make Image from Web Page node. Recently we thought of one potential solution, which would be to render the image to a virtual screen rather than an offscreen window, but we'd have to try it and see if it worked. If not, the only solution we know of would be to reimplement the node with a different web browser engine, as I mentioned on the other bug report.

Although the limitations with Make Image from Web Page are arguably a bug rather than a missing feature, the amount of effort required to fix the limitations is more like a feature request than a typical bug report. So if this is important to you, please create a feature request, linking to this bug report, so the community can prioritize it relative to other improvements.