Download A Website For Offline Viewing Chrome

 

Viewing

Make chrome webpages available offline. Is there anyway to make pages available offline in chrome? I realise I can pin a page, but this leaves the door open for accidentally closing the tab or hitting refresh etc. When you find something on the web that you want to view later, put it in Pocket. It automatically syncs to your phone.

by Martin Brinkmann on October 07, 2015 in Google Chrome - 3 comments

Google launched a new experimental feature in Chrome Dev for Android recently that enables you to save pages to the device to access them at a later point in time without Internet connection requirement.

You may use it to create a personal stash of pages that are accessible while offline which can be mighty useful in situations where you need access to pages and know that Internet reception is not the best or not available at all.

For instance, while on a business trip, you could connect your phone to your hotel's WiFi to save maps, business websites, local traffic information or even the homepage of your hotel locally on your phone to bring these saved pages up whenever the need arises while on the road even if you don't have Internet access at all.

Offline

While offline use may be the more important factor here for users speed is definitely another consideration as pages will open faster if they have been saved to the device.

Naturally, this works best for pages that don't change at all or only rarely and not so well for pages that change frequently or are dynamic.

Setting Saved Pages up on Chrome

Please note that the feature is currently only available in Chrome Dev on Android. Since it is an experimental feature, it may be removed at any time or make its way to the stable version of Chrome one day.

Here is what you need to do:

  1. Type chrome://flags in the mobile browser's address bar to load the page.
  2. Use Menu > Find in Page to search for Enable Enhanced Bookmarks.
  3. Set the preference to Enabled.
  4. Use Menu > Find in Page to search for Enable offline pages.
  5. Set the preferences to Enabled.
  6. Tap on the relaunch now button.

Once done you have enabled the option to save offline pages using Chrome's new bookmarking system.

To make use of it simply bookmark a page in Chrome. The browser will automatically save the bookmarked page to the saved pages.

Chrome displays a notification at the bottom that the page has been saved for offline use. You may tap on the edit button next to the notification to edit the bookmark's name, folder or url, check the size of the offline data, and remove it again from storage.

All pages that you have saved offline this way are accessible under the new Saved Pages entry in the Chrome menu.

A tap on it displays them all and another tap on one of the saved pages opens it without Internet connection requirement.

There are several indicators that you are viewing the local copy of the page. First, you will see the file protocol being used in Chrome's address bar and second, Chrome displays a notification at the bottom of the page informing you that you are viewing an offline copy of the page.

You may tap on reload there to load the latest version of it instead which may be useful if page content changes frequently.

Only text and images are saved while dynamic content such as advertisement are not. The saved Ghacks page included user comments and other textual data which means that all of the page with the exception of script driven contents are loaded in offline mode.

Verdict

The feature works really well and may replace third-party solutions on Chrome mobile for some users. One thing that may keep it from becoming mainstream is that it taps directly in Chrome's bookmarking system which means that all bookmarks will be saved as offline pages automatically from the moment you make the changes.

While it is possible to remove pages again from local storage, it would be quite cumbersome if you save bookmarks regularly that you don't want provided as offline copies. (via Android Police)

Save pages for offline viewing in mobile Chrome
Description
Configure Chrome for Android to save web pages you visit for offline viewing.
Author
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Sometimes you need to have access to a website’s data while offline. Maybe you’d like a backup of your own website but your hosting service doesn’t have an option to do so. It may be the case that you’d like to imitate how a popular website is structured or what their CSS/HTML files look like. Whatever the case there are a few ways you can download a part of or a complete website for offline access.

Some websites are too good to simply linger online that’s why we’ve gathered 5 tools which you can use to easily download any website right to your local PC, similar to our guide about backing up your Twitter account.

The programs we mention below can serve this purpose very well. The options are straightforward enough that you can begin downloading an entire website in just a couple of minutes.

Download Partial or Complete Website for Offline Access

HTTrack

HTTrack is an extremely popular program for downloading websites. Although the interface isn’t quite modern, it functions very well for its intended purpose. The wizard is easy to use and will follow you through settings that define where the website should be saved and some specifics like what files should be avoided in the download.

For example, exclude whole links from the site if you have no reason to extract those portions.

Also, specify how many concurrent connections should be opened for downloading the pages. These are all available from the “Set options” button during the wizard:

If a particular file is taking too long to download, you can easily skip it or cancel the process midway.

When the files have been downloaded, you can open the website at its root using a file similar to this one here, which is “index.html.”

Download A Website For Offline Chrome

Getleft

Chrome Save Website Offline

Getleft has a new, modern feel to its interface. Upon launch, press “Ctrl + U” to quickly get started by entering an URL and save directory. Before the download begins, you’ll be asked which files should be downloaded.

We are using Google as our example, so these pages should look familiar. Every page that’s included in the download will be extracted, which means every file from those particular pages will be downloaded.

Once begun, all files will be pulled to the local system like so:

Download Google Chrome Offline Installer

When complete, you can browse the website offline by opening the main index file.

PageNest

PageNest reminds me a bit of both HTTrack and Getleft combined. Enter the address of the website to download in the “Address” tab from the main page upon program launch. You’ll be asked for the essentials like the name of the site and where it should be saved.

Select a few options in the “Range” tab – choose whether to download pages that are not under the selected domain, among other settings and then start the download.

When complete, you can open the download and view it offline, like this:

Cyotek WebCopy

Use predefined passwords for authentication and create rules with Cyotek WebCopy to download a full site for offline viewing. Start a copy of the “F5” key and watch as the files are downloaded.

The total size of the currently downloaded files shows in the bottom right corner of the window.

Download A Website For Offline Viewing Chrome Windows 10

You can even create a web diagram for a visual representation of the files.

Download A Website For Offline Viewing Chrome Windows 10

Wikipedia Dumps

Wikipedia doesn’t advise users to use programs like those above to download from their site. Instead, they have Dumps we can download here. For example, here are dumps for October 28th, 2013:

Download these clumps of data in XML format, extracting them with something like 7-Zip.

Conclusion

Website Offline Browser

Among the listed programs, I’ll say with confidence you’ll be able to download any website you want. Whether authentication is required or you only want select pages to be extracted, one of the above freeware programs will surely do.

The Wikipedia is a great resource for offline access. Studying about a topic or just want to read up on a specific topic? Download the data from the Wikipedia dumps and access it offline anytime you want.

Download A Website For Offline Viewing Chrome Version

If you like the idea of accessing websites offline you may like to read about using Gmail without an internet connection with the Gmail Offline Extension.