Hacker News Reader

Comment by jarcane | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else remember when this was a standard feature in a lot of desktop browsers? Or am I crazy.

You are not. I hate how browsers nowadays, especially browsers on smartphones, are unusable without access to Internet. Sure, there is Pocket for instance, but IMHO there shouldn't be need for such app. And while I'm ranting at Pocket - there is still no automated login for LWN.net. (I know I can go with manual way, but still...)

P.S. I'm thinking about making nice dedicated cross-platform LWN.net articles & comments reader one day (well, maybe more), but it's hard to squeeze out enough time for that kind of fiddling (unless it's really a gravely matter, but it isn't here).

Opera Mobile (the "classic" one before they threw it all away) let you save pages for offline reading. Not perfect but better than nothing. Sadly it did not cache content through restarts which is annoying on mobile where apps get killed a lot. But if I recall correctly at least the navigation back and forward was instant, like on desktop, with no network traffic.

What about appcache manifest, service workers in chrome, and hood.ie? There's ways to make the web work offline.

It infuriates me that my browser keeps this big cache of web content, but refuses to show it to me when I don't have an Internet connection! This is the main reason people keep asking for an app, when all they really want is offline access.

Google added offline browsing to Chrome late last year. To enable it go to:

    chrome://flags/#enable-offline-load-stale-cache

"When a page fails to load, if a stale copy of the page exists in the browser, a button will be presented to allow the user to load that stale copy."

It's still very difficult to verify or ensure that the sites you know you'll need will actually be cached when you need them. For instance, you may not need page XYZ of the documentation now, but you might later when you're coding on the beach, and there's no way to force Chrome to crawl it besides preemptively visiting the page - and even then it might be evicted for any number of reasons!

Batch Save Pocket [1] is my stopgap solution, but Pocket's not at all optimized for documentation.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/batch-save-pocket/...

I haven't tried the app yet, but I think there's a difference.

With the browser, you browse a page, and it caches it. But you have to browse it first.

With an app, you could specify that you want the latest homepage? x-page(s)? and let the app poll for you.

So there's definitely place for innovation, I guess.

Maybe we're speaking about different things but I remember in IE you could save the page + it would save a certain number of links deep from that page.

I remember this being a massive deal in the marketing for MSIE 4, alongside the Active Desktop, also an idea more than a decade ahead of its time.

doesn't HTML5 AppCache allow for some offline features now? But I agree, this should absolutely already be a feature that everyone plans for when they're making websites. Even when users have a connections plenty of people are one slow mobile connections and caching will prevent unnecessary page load times.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com