what is the purpose of Offline mode in a web browser?

Question

What is actually the purpose of offline mode. does it somehow manages the caching system of the browser. or it just skips the host resolution part, dont know for what. what probably the designer had in mind, when he developed the offline mode feature.

Answer 1

It's something that most of us wouldn't use very often, but it was useful in the past when we used dial-up modems (and especially for those of us who had time limited plans). You could connect to the internet, go to a website, quickly browse through everything you thought could be useful, disconnect, go to offline mode and then browse through the site as though you were connected (for everything was cached).

I didn't realise browsers still had them (I can't remember the last time I went to the File menu in Firefox though).

Answer 2

I think it's something from the old days, where connections were mostly dial-up (read: slow, and not always connected), and browsers relied on caching material off-line, so if you're not connected, you'd see the cached version in an off-line mode.

I guess it still applies to countries that still don't have DSL everywhere.

Answer 3

You might use it to find out what happens to people who are using your web application if their internet connection is flaky or drops out. You can also use it if you're only interested in accessing local files, not websites.

Answer 4

It doesn't try to access the network, but instead fetches all content from the cache.

Answer 5

in developed countries (asia especially), internet are rare and expensive (there are quota or time based) so offline is very good feature to have for them.

Sometimes you are out and you need to check something on web .. you can use that offline cache.

Answer 6

I wonder if it will became more used in the west these days as people with net-books and other ultra portable devices travel round lots? While wi-fi hot spots and 3g data connections are popular they are still not universal.

I know when I designed my html/javascript open source chess clock, I deliberately designed it to work off-line very easily, so I could just download it onto my netbook and meet my chess friends in cafes without having to worry if the cafe had a good wifi signal or not.

Now, where's the "Blatant Plug" tag?

Answer 7

It helps you to may be browse through a site fast & with a large cache size set , U go to offline mode & read the pages with your Time based Internet connection switched off.

Answer 8

As has been stated by David Johnstone, I used to use the Offline Mode during dial-up days for reading articles/pages from cache when connection to the internet was disconnected.

Answer 9

As my experience, normally offline servers are using while online servers are down or accessibility problem with our web server via internet, meanwhile we are using our offline server to get the informations. Then once the web server is up then we can synchronic the datas from offline server to online server.