View Recent Web Pages Offline
You might have suffered many times when you were without Internet, yet you still need to see a webpage that you were looking at just moments earlier. Its frustrating, but if youre running Chrome or Firefox then getting to a recently viewed webpage while offline is easy. Both browsers have the ability to display content in their respective cachestemporarily saved web page datainstead of the live version of the site. This can be imperfect since the page can change while youre offline, rendering the saved version inaccurate, and the browser cache only contains a limited amount of your recent browsing history. It also doesnt work on sites that provide live feeds of content, such as Facebook or Netflix. Nevertheless, if you need information from a news item or another site you were just viewing, try one of these solutions. Browsers like Google Chrome & Firefox save a cached copy of your recent browsed web pages, and so we will be using this feature to view the recently closed web pages without internet connection.
How to view recent web pages offline in Google Chrome?
Chromes method to display stale (not live) web pages is currently experimental. By default Chrome can show some webpages when offline, but with this setting enabled the feature is far more robust.
- To get ready for offline mode in Chrome type
chrome://flags/#show-saved-copy "
(Without Quotes) in the URL address bar. Then select Enable: Primary from the dropdown menu under the Enable Show Saved Copy Button heading. - Once thats done, restart your browser for the feature to take effect.
- To test viewing a cached page, take your PC offline and open a webpage from your recent browsing history. You should see Chromes typical offline error messageexcept now youll also see a Show saved copy button as pictured above. Click that button and youll see the version of the webpage as it was when you were last online.
How to view recent web pages offline in Mozilla Firefox?
Theres no special flag to set in Firefox in order to view content offline.
- To view pages from your cache click on the menu hamburger icon in the upper right corner.
- Then select Developer > Work Offline. Now Firefox will display the page you want as long as its in the browsers cache.