Do you know that Google Chrome web browser allows you to extract a Web page & certain of its elements (images etc.) when you don’t have any connectivity to the internet? If your answer is NO, then lets check out in this post how to use Chrome without any internet connection on Windows, Linux, Mac, Chrome OS and Android mobile/tablet devices?
1. First of all open THIS POST in a new tab in Chrome web browser and let the page fully load. Once fully loaded, turn off your internet/Wi-Fi completely and type chrome://flags in a new tab.
2. A new page will load which says:
WARNING These experimental features may change, break or disappear at any time. We make absolutely no guarantees about what may happen if you turn one of these experiments on, and your browser may even spontaneously combust. Jokes aside, your browser may delete all your data or your security and privacy could be compromised in unexpected ways. Any experiments that you enable will be enabled for all users of this browser. Please proceed with caution. Interested in cool new Chrome features? Try our beta channel at chrome.com/beta.
3. Scroll down this page or use inbuilt Find function (CTRL + F) of Chrome and look for Enable Offline Load Stale Button option:
Note: You can also use chrome://flags/#enable-offline-load-stale-cache to directly access the above option without any requirement of scrolling/finding.
4. Using the drop down menu below it, select Enabled:
5. As soon as you select Enabled, you will see following message at the bottom of your browser:
Your changes will take effect the next time you relaunch Google Chrome. Relaunch Now.
Click on Relaunch Now Button and your browser will restart.
Note: When you click on Relaunch Now button, all your opened tabs (if any) will be restored automatically. But I will highly suggest you to save any work that you are doing in your browser before clicking on the Relaunch Now button.
6. Now Reload THIS POST again in your browser (make sure that there is no internet connectivity) and you will see a brand new Show Saved Copy button just below the The web page is not available error:
7. Click on it and you will be able to see the cached/stale version of the web page including images.
Important notes:
- This feature is great but you may frequently encounter broken web pages with it. This is due to non-availability of CSS and certain other web technologies like JavaScript etc. in the cache.
- This feature may not work with HTTPS and dynamic websites. It works quite well with static web pages that use HTTP.
- If you see a Cache Miss error in your browser, then either the page is not present in the cache or the browser is unable to load the page due to some other problem.
- You can also use this feature to open your cached inbox page of Gmail, Yahoo mail, Outlook etc. in your browser. However keep in mind that if you try to open any mail in offline mode then only those emails may open which are already present in the cache. All other mails will show either a blank page or page not available error (Example).
- The information present in these cached offline web pages might be outdated.
- Don’t hard refresh your browser (CTRL + F5) as otherwise your browser will delete the previously stored cached page and all its elements.