How To View Cached Pages Offline

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Level 1

140 points

How To View Cached Pages Offline

While sitting in a restaurant with no internet connection, I wanted to look at a site I had been looking at earlier, just before I left for the restaurant. In the Safari History bookmarks, I could see the complete webpages represented in cover-flow. However, when I clicked on the page I wanted to read, I simply got the "cannot connect to internet message". Now in the past versions of Safari, if the page was recently loaded in my cache, I could still see it. Is there some trick to do this under Safari 4.0.4?

Shouldn't I be able to view a cached page when offline, if I can see the miniaturized version of it in Cover-flow history view?

MacBook Core Duo 2.0, Mac OS X (10.6), 2GB RAM/500GB 7200 HD

Posted on Nov 12, 2009 5:14 AM

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Answer 1

Nov 12, 2009 5:32 AM in response to Woodwyn

HI,

You need to Save As the page while online first.

When online from the Safari Menu Bar, click: File / Save As and save as Web Archive.

Carolyn 🙂

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Answer 2

Woodwyn Author

Level 1

140 points

Nov 12, 2009 6:48 AM in response to Carolyn Samit

Thanks. However, that is not very practical if I do not know in advance of losing my internet connection that I am going to want to view that content off-line. Safari used to just show you what was stored in the cache, without requiring a complete refresh each time it loads the web page. I've also noticed there is no way to set whether Safari caches content or forces a refresh each time the site is visited.

Also, "save-as" does not always work. I find some content in the save-as is not stored in the document, for some reason. Particularly flash content, which is otherwise stored in the cache.

Here's another situation that happened a few months ago. I was doing research online and lost my internet connection from my ISP. I had several pages I was visiting that had been loaded into the cache. I could see them in the history cover-flow, but when I tried to access them all I got was "not connected to the internet". Sadly, until my ISP was back up, I could not do anything with the information that was already in my browser's cache. This was not the case under Safari 3, in which a sudden loss of connectivity did not stop me from accessing the work I had done.

Seriously, I am not going to save each site I visit on the off chance I may need to access it offline – I thought that's what the cache was for. There must be a better solution.

I just checked – Firefox does not have this problem. Recently browsed URLs remain accessible offline via cache.

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Answer 3

Woodwyn Author

Level 1

140 points

Nov 12, 2009 11:07 AM in response to Woodwyn

It looks like this issue has come up numerous times before:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1501735

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9738504

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8911284

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7995500

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7952473

... and I could go on and on ...

And here's the problem with web archives:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9621500

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7714331

HONESTLY, why does Safari lag so far behind every other browser? Looks like I am finally going to switch to Firefox.

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