6 ms·

Isn't this how the internet was supposed to work in the first place? I remember Netscape navigator having a 'go offline' icon in the corner.

reaperducer 6y ago
I remember that button, too, but I think it had more to do with connection charges than caching. In Netscape days, many people would have to pay by the minute to be connected to the internet. In those days, web pages generally contained far more information than they do now, and were less interactive. So you'd connect, load the content you wanted to see, disconnect, and then just sit there and read it for free, instead of bleeding cash.
- asdff 6y ago
  Or even dialup. Expecting a phone call? Go offline.
- derefr 6y ago
  I'm not sure that was the use-case. With pre-DHTML HTML4, there really just wasn't anything on a page that could continue to interact with the server after the page finished loading. So, presuming the button was for your described use-case, what would the difference be between "going offline" and just... not clicking any more links? (It's not like Netscape could or should signal your modem to hang up — Netscape doesn't know what else in your OS might also be using the modem.)
  - Donald 6y ago
    You must be young :) These browsers were born in the era of dialup Internet that had per minute charges and/or long distance charges. At the very least you were tying up your family's phone line. Basically it's like paying for every minute your cable modem is plugged in. For the feature itself: Netscape had integration with the modem connectivity for the OS and would initiate a connection when you tried to visit a remote page. Offline mode let you disable automatic dialing of the modem.
    - derefr 6y ago
      I ran a BBS, my friend :) I'm quite familiar with modems. I just never used Windows (or the web!) until well past the Netscape era, so I'm not too familiar with the intersection of modems and early web browsers. > Netscape had integration with the modem connectivity for the OS and would initiate a connection when you tried to visit a remote page. That's not "integration with modem connectivity", that's just going through the OS's socket API (or userland socket stack, e.g. Trumpet Winsock); where the socket library dials the modem to serve the first bind(2). Sort of like auto-mounting a network share to serve a VFS open(2). Try it yourself: boot up a Windows 95 OSR2 machine with a (configured) modem, and try e.g. loading your Outlook Express email. The modem will dial. It's a feature of the socket stack. These socket stacks would also automatically hang up the modem if the stack was idle (= no open sockets) for long enough. My point was that a quiescent HTML4 browser has no open sockets, whether or not it's intentionally "offline." If you do as you say — load up a bunch of pages, and then sit there reading them — your modem will hang up, whether or not you play with Netscape's toggles. (On single-tasking OSes like DOS — where a TCP/IP socket stack would be a part of a program, rather than a part of the OS — there was software that would eagerly hang up the modem whenever its internal socket refcount dropped to zero. But this isn't really a useful strategy for a multitasking OS, since a lot of things — e.g. AOL's chatroom software presaging AIM — would love to poll just often enough to cause the line that had just disconnected to reconnect. Since calls were charged per-minute rather than per-second, these reconnects had overhead costs!) > [Netscape's] offline mode let you disable automatic dialing of the modem. When you do... what? When you first open the browser, to avoid loading your home page? (I guess that's sensible, especially if you're using Netscape in its capacity as an email client to read your already-synced email; or using it to author and test HTML; or using it to read local HTML documentation. And yet, not too sensible, since you need to open the browser to get to that toggle... is this a thing you had to think about in advance, like turning off your AC before shutting off your car?) But I think you're implying that it's for when you try to navigate to a URL in the address bar, or click a link. In which case, would the page, in fact, be served from the client-side cache, or would you just get nothing? (Was HTTP client-side caching even a thing in the early 90s? Did disks have the room to hold client-side caches? Did web servers by-and-large bother to send HTTP/1.0 Expires and Last-Modified headers? Etc.)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - rzzzt 6y ago
    Server-Sent Events? How old is that mechanism?
    - shakna 6y ago
      2006 was when Opera added the functionality which would become Server Sent. [0] [0] https://dev.opera.com/blog/event-streaming-to-web-browsers/ https://dev.opera.com/blog/event-streaming-to-web-browsers/
- rusk 6y ago
  Back in the nineties the web was fairly new and people still used a thing called usenet quite a bit. You interacted with it kind of like email (Google groups is actually the final vestiges of it) - and the go offline button would just download all your emails and newsgroups and you got peruse them offline at your pleasure. It might seem strange also that back in those days you downloaded your emails from a server using POP3 rather than looking at them remotely (e.g. Web or IMAP), and you viewed them offline.
  - account42 6y ago
    IMAP can still be used to synchronize an offline copy, and it makes sense to do so in case your provider fucks you over.
  - kjaftaedi 6y ago
    News servers don't use POP3. They serve articles over NNTP.
    - rusk 6y ago
      > back in those days you downloaded your emails from a server using POP3 I would have said UUCP for news but that's showing my age.
lights0123 6y ago
Firefox still has it under File.
- teddyh 6y ago
  In the modern hamburger menu, it’s under “More”.
  - anonymfus 6y ago
    Ever if you have menu disabled, you can still open it by pressing Alt, no need to suffer using hamburger.
- runxel 6y ago
  Sure, but does it do anything?
  - nocman 6y ago
    Yes, it disables access to remote resources: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1263417 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1263417 So if you have a local web server (like on localhost), you'll still be able to access it, but you won't be able to access non-local IPs.
romanoderoma 6y ago
Don't know if recently it changed, but that's how internet in Cuba works (at least until 2014) https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/23/cuba-offline-internet-weekly-packet-external-hard-drives https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2014/...
rusk 6y ago
Kind of. HTTP was designed with caching in mind, so the idea was that if you GET a page it should more or less not change and you could add headers and stuff to instruct proxy servers about whether to cache or not and for how long. I think you could use HEAD then to check if a page had changed ... The browser cache used to actually be quite dependable as an offline way to view pages but this seems to have fallen out of favour in the mid naughties. I remember how disgusted I was when I realised Safari was no longer me letting see a page unless it could contact the server and download the latest version. I used to have a caching proxy server that would basically MITM my browsing and be more vigilant than even the cache and it really worked quite well. This was back in the 90s when every bit of your max 54kbs counted, or when you wanted to read something while your Dad or sister wanted to also use the phone. Anyway, you can no longer take this approach because bad people broke the Internet and now you have to have a great honking opaque TLS layer between you and the caching servers so there's no way for this optimisation to work any more. Of course it isn't really as important these days because we've got faster connections and interactions with the server are far less transactional and richer. But I still would like to have a way of tracking my own webusage and being able to go back in time without having to actually revisit each and every site. These days you have to hack the browser because that's where your TLS endpoint emerges. Kaspersky tried this for their HTTP firewall application and there was ructions over that. I'll defo take a look at this. Sounds just like what I've been looking for. > Isn't this how the internet was supposed to work in the first place? I remember Netscape navigator having a 'go offline' icon in the corner. Thinking back actually, if you forget about "the web"/HTTP - then yes actually - this is exactly how usenet worked and now I'm remembering that the "go offline" button used to download all your newsgroups along with your email and stuff so you could look at it all offline :-) If you want something that's like Usenet these days check out Scuttlebut.
- johnmaguire2013 6y ago
  > Kind of. HTTP was designed with caching in mind, so the idea was that if you GET a page it should more or less not change and you could add headers and stuff to instruct proxy servers about whether to cache or not and for how long. I think you could use HEAD then to check if a page had changed ... Nothing in the HTTP spec has changed about this AFAIK. The internet still behaves this way. > Anyway, you can no longer take this approach because bad people broke the Internet and now you have to have a great honking opaque TLS layer between you and the caching servers so there's no way for this optimisation to work any more. You could certainly still do this, you just need to import the proxy's CA certificate into your browser. It's just not possible to do to others on your network without consent now. (This is a security feature, not a bug.)
boogies 6y ago
My Palemoon still has a “Work Offline” item in its File menu.

reaperducer 6y ago

I remember that button, too, but I think it had more to do with connection charges than caching. In Netscape days, many people would have to pay by the minute to be connected to the internet. In those days, web pages generally contained far more information than they do now, and were less interactive. So you'd connect, load the content you wanted to see, disconnect, and then just sit there and read it for free, instead of bleeding cash.

asdff 6y ago
Or even dialup. Expecting a phone call? Go offline.
derefr 6y ago
I'm not sure that was the use-case. With pre-DHTML HTML4, there really just wasn't anything on a page that could continue to interact with the server after the page finished loading. So, presuming the button was for your described use-case, what would the difference be between "going offline" and just... not clicking any more links? (It's not like Netscape could or should signal your modem to hang up — Netscape doesn't know what else in your OS might also be using the modem.)
- Donald 6y ago
  You must be young :) These browsers were born in the era of dialup Internet that had per minute charges and/or long distance charges. At the very least you were tying up your family's phone line. Basically it's like paying for every minute your cable modem is plugged in. For the feature itself: Netscape had integration with the modem connectivity for the OS and would initiate a connection when you tried to visit a remote page. Offline mode let you disable automatic dialing of the modem.
  - derefr 6y ago
    I ran a BBS, my friend :) I'm quite familiar with modems. I just never used Windows (or the web!) until well past the Netscape era, so I'm not too familiar with the intersection of modems and early web browsers. > Netscape had integration with the modem connectivity for the OS and would initiate a connection when you tried to visit a remote page. That's not "integration with modem connectivity", that's just going through the OS's socket API (or userland socket stack, e.g. Trumpet Winsock); where the socket library dials the modem to serve the first bind(2). Sort of like auto-mounting a network share to serve a VFS open(2). Try it yourself: boot up a Windows 95 OSR2 machine with a (configured) modem, and try e.g. loading your Outlook Express email. The modem will dial. It's a feature of the socket stack. These socket stacks would also automatically hang up the modem if the stack was idle (= no open sockets) for long enough. My point was that a quiescent HTML4 browser has no open sockets, whether or not it's intentionally "offline." If you do as you say — load up a bunch of pages, and then sit there reading them — your modem will hang up, whether or not you play with Netscape's toggles. (On single-tasking OSes like DOS — where a TCP/IP socket stack would be a part of a program, rather than a part of the OS — there was software that would eagerly hang up the modem whenever its internal socket refcount dropped to zero. But this isn't really a useful strategy for a multitasking OS, since a lot of things — e.g. AOL's chatroom software presaging AIM — would love to poll just often enough to cause the line that had just disconnected to reconnect. Since calls were charged per-minute rather than per-second, these reconnects had overhead costs!) > [Netscape's] offline mode let you disable automatic dialing of the modem. When you do... what? When you first open the browser, to avoid loading your home page? (I guess that's sensible, especially if you're using Netscape in its capacity as an email client to read your already-synced email; or using it to author and test HTML; or using it to read local HTML documentation. And yet, not too sensible, since you need to open the browser to get to that toggle... is this a thing you had to think about in advance, like turning off your AC before shutting off your car?) But I think you're implying that it's for when you try to navigate to a URL in the address bar, or click a link. In which case, would the page, in fact, be served from the client-side cache, or would you just get nothing? (Was HTTP client-side caching even a thing in the early 90s? Did disks have the room to hold client-side caches? Did web servers by-and-large bother to send HTTP/1.0 Expires and Last-Modified headers? Etc.)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- rzzzt 6y ago
  Server-Sent Events? How old is that mechanism?
  - shakna 6y ago
    2006 was when Opera added the functionality which would become Server Sent. [0] [0] https://dev.opera.com/blog/event-streaming-to-web-browsers/ https://dev.opera.com/blog/event-streaming-to-web-browsers/
rusk 6y ago
Back in the nineties the web was fairly new and people still used a thing called usenet quite a bit. You interacted with it kind of like email (Google groups is actually the final vestiges of it) - and the go offline button would just download all your emails and newsgroups and you got peruse them offline at your pleasure. It might seem strange also that back in those days you downloaded your emails from a server using POP3 rather than looking at them remotely (e.g. Web or IMAP), and you viewed them offline.
- account42 6y ago
  IMAP can still be used to synchronize an offline copy, and it makes sense to do so in case your provider fucks you over.
- kjaftaedi 6y ago
  News servers don't use POP3. They serve articles over NNTP.
  - rusk 6y ago
    > back in those days you downloaded your emails from a server using POP3 I would have said UUCP for news but that's showing my age.

lights0123 6y ago

Firefox still has it under File.

teddyh 6y ago
In the modern hamburger menu, it’s under “More”.
- anonymfus 6y ago
  Ever if you have menu disabled, you can still open it by pressing Alt, no need to suffer using hamburger.
runxel 6y ago
Sure, but does it do anything?
- nocman 6y ago
  Yes, it disables access to remote resources: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1263417 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1263417 So if you have a local web server (like on localhost), you'll still be able to access it, but you won't be able to access non-local IPs.

romanoderoma 6y ago

Don't know if recently it changed, but that's how internet in Cuba works (at least until 2014) https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/23/cuba-offline-internet-weekly-packet-external-hard-drives https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2014/...

rusk 6y ago

Kind of. HTTP was designed with caching in mind, so the idea was that if you GET a page it should more or less not change and you could add headers and stuff to instruct proxy servers about whether to cache or not and for how long. I think you could use HEAD then to check if a page had changed ... The browser cache used to actually be quite dependable as an offline way to view pages but this seems to have fallen out of favour in the mid naughties. I remember how disgusted I was when I realised Safari was no longer me letting see a page unless it could contact the server and download the latest version. I used to have a caching proxy server that would basically MITM my browsing and be more vigilant than even the cache and it really worked quite well. This was back in the 90s when every bit of your max 54kbs counted, or when you wanted to read something while your Dad or sister wanted to also use the phone. Anyway, you can no longer take this approach because bad people broke the Internet and now you have to have a great honking opaque TLS layer between you and the caching servers so there's no way for this optimisation to work any more. Of course it isn't really as important these days because we've got faster connections and interactions with the server are far less transactional and richer. But I still would like to have a way of tracking my own webusage and being able to go back in time without having to actually revisit each and every site. These days you have to hack the browser because that's where your TLS endpoint emerges. Kaspersky tried this for their HTTP firewall application and there was ructions over that. I'll defo take a look at this. Sounds just like what I've been looking for. > Isn't this how the internet was supposed to work in the first place? I remember Netscape navigator having a 'go offline' icon in the corner. Thinking back actually, if you forget about "the web"/HTTP - then yes actually - this is exactly how usenet worked and now I'm remembering that the "go offline" button used to download all your newsgroups along with your email and stuff so you could look at it all offline :-) If you want something that's like Usenet these days check out Scuttlebut.

johnmaguire2013 6y ago
> Kind of. HTTP was designed with caching in mind, so the idea was that if you GET a page it should more or less not change and you could add headers and stuff to instruct proxy servers about whether to cache or not and for how long. I think you could use HEAD then to check if a page had changed ... Nothing in the HTTP spec has changed about this AFAIK. The internet still behaves this way. > Anyway, you can no longer take this approach because bad people broke the Internet and now you have to have a great honking opaque TLS layer between you and the caching servers so there's no way for this optimisation to work any more. You could certainly still do this, you just need to import the proxy's CA certificate into your browser. It's just not possible to do to others on your network without consent now. (This is a security feature, not a bug.)

boogies 6y ago

My Palemoon still has a “Work Offline” item in its File menu.