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I feel like the “Make website browsable offline” feature of yesteryears have been neglected. Somehow people assume everyone always has internet connectivity...

I feel like the “Make website browsable offline” feature of yesteryears have been neglected. Somehow people assume everyone always has internet connectivity... but I need to save websites, docs, etc, for long flights or camping trips without signal. Safari annoyingly has a reading list feature that claims to cache the web page but annoyingly 50% of the time doesn’t. As with all apple cloud services there is just no way to explicitly sync.

EamonnMR 6y ago
Offline users don't generate data/ad impressions, so offline user experience isn't considered.
giancarlostoro 6y ago
Oddly enough Mozilla gets crap for it but they bought Pocket which allows for offline reading. I think its fine for Mozilla to include Pocket. We seem to be fine installing Chrome which has much worse spyware. You can uninstall Pocket, you gotta go through more effort to uninstall Googles OS from Chrome.
saurik 6y ago
Since when is the Safari Reading List a cloud service? It might be that I just have most of iCloud disabled and that makes the system work as expected, but for me it is definitely 100% local (at which point I would presume failures are due to the mechanism it using to save things not working on all kinds of web pages: I honestly only use it for simple document sites, and so wouldn't know if it fails a lot on rich web app sites).
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I think perhaps they're annoyed that their Reading List isn't syncing between their devices and Apple hasn't put a button that forces the sync to occur.
  - chrischen 6y ago
    Yes, it is advertised as being able to make it available offline. But if you save it to reading list on iPhone, or your Mac, there's no guarantee it's available on the other device and often it even stops working on the device that I added to reading list.
eitland 6y ago
Until Firefox broke its extension API there was an extremely useful extension called Scrapbook that could you could point at a website and save that site and all linked site (with settings for how far to recurse and what URL patterns to accept.) FTR: I still use Firefox as for me the alternatives are worse. As someone else mentioned Pocket exist and while the communication around it could hardly been worse it is still way better than Chrome IMO.
judex 6y ago
Exactly the reason I use Opera on Android devices. Does not save movies or odd file data but html + images perfectly and web pages looks like originals. I use it a lot to save pages for offline viewing during flights. Now Vivaldi is on Android too and I hope it does have the same feature.

EamonnMR 6y ago

Offline users don't generate data/ad impressions, so offline user experience isn't considered.

giancarlostoro 6y ago

Oddly enough Mozilla gets crap for it but they bought Pocket which allows for offline reading. I think its fine for Mozilla to include Pocket. We seem to be fine installing Chrome which has much worse spyware. You can uninstall Pocket, you gotta go through more effort to uninstall Googles OS from Chrome.

saurik 6y ago

Since when is the Safari Reading List a cloud service? It might be that I just have most of iCloud disabled and that makes the system work as expected, but for me it is definitely 100% local (at which point I would presume failures are due to the mechanism it using to save things not working on all kinds of web pages: I honestly only use it for simple document sites, and so wouldn't know if it fails a lot on rich web app sites).

saagarjha 6y ago
I think perhaps they're annoyed that their Reading List isn't syncing between their devices and Apple hasn't put a button that forces the sync to occur.
- chrischen 6y ago
  Yes, it is advertised as being able to make it available offline. But if you save it to reading list on iPhone, or your Mac, there's no guarantee it's available on the other device and often it even stops working on the device that I added to reading list.

eitland 6y ago

Until Firefox broke its extension API there was an extremely useful extension called Scrapbook that could you could point at a website and save that site and all linked site (with settings for how far to recurse and what URL patterns to accept.) FTR: I still use Firefox as for me the alternatives are worse. As someone else mentioned Pocket exist and while the communication around it could hardly been worse it is still way better than Chrome IMO.

judex 6y ago

Exactly the reason I use Opera on Android devices. Does not save movies or odd file data but html + images perfectly and web pages looks like originals. I use it a lot to save pages for offline viewing during flights. Now Vivaldi is on Android too and I hope it does have the same feature.