Can I take Safari offline without closing?

Question

Level 1

9 points

Can I take Safari offline without closing?

I'm doing some very bandwidth intensive backups to an online server and would like to minimize all other network traffic whenever I can. I keep about 10 open tabs in Safari and don't want to close it down when I need to open up bandwidth. Does anyone know a way to simply take Safari offline without closing it down?

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.6), 2.66 GHz Dual-Core Intel

Posted on Mar 21, 2011 2:55 PM

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Answer 1

Mar 21, 2011 5:31 PM in response to agxsam

Hi,

You don't have to quit Safari. Just leave the pages open.

You can view pages offline but in order to update a page you'll need an internet connection.

Carolyn 🙂

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Answer 2

agxsam Author

Level 1

9 points

Mar 21, 2011 7:23 PM in response to Carolyn Samit

I guess I wasn't clear. Many of my 10+ tabs and windows are continuously updating (CNN, MarketWatch, live webcams, etc.) and eat up a lot of bandwidth. I want to stop the updating (turn off internet access) without closing windows or the program, and then "turn it back on" when I need to.

You can take a mail reader (like Entourage) offline without closing the program. Is there a way to do that with Safari?

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Answer 3

Mar 21, 2011 7:38 PM in response to agxsam

You can't take Safari offline, but you could quit safari and then reopen it when you're done with whatever and click "History"->"Reopen All Windows From Last Session" and automatically re-open those tabs. That's about as close as you can get without some 3rd party stuff. I see this menu option on Safari 5.0.4

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Answer 4

agxsam Author

Level 1

9 points

Mar 21, 2011 7:56 PM in response to AppleBoy2345

Thanks, but that's what I do now and am trying to avoid - all the opening and closing - even with the History command. Do you know of any 3rd party stuff that will take Safari offline?

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Answer 5

andyBall_uk

Level 7

20,516 points

Mar 22, 2011 4:35 AM in response to agxsam

could you maybe use glimmerblocker or other proxy, & set it to block 'everything' (except the connections you require), then toggle on/off as required ?

I've not seen any 'work offline' extension or other extra for Safari.

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Answer 6

Mar 22, 2011 10:04 AM in response to agxsam

The only things I've seen for Safari actually change the system-wide proxy settings (on macs) - so that probably wouldn't help you.

Another thing you could try is to enable the "Develop" menu in Safari and then click "Develop"->"Disable Javascript" - since most of those pages probably use javascript to refresh the pages. But that wouldn't stop a page that uses a META Refresh=n tag, and probably wouldn't stop the webcam refreshes as those usually run under Java, not javascript. You could give it a shot, though, and see if it helps.

Other than that, you may have to check different browsers, I know Firefox and Opera have a "Work Offline" command. I don't think Chrome does, however.

If you have Little Snitch, you could just make a temporary rule to block any connection to Safari, and then unblock it later, but that's kind of a hassle...

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Answer 7

agxsam Author

Level 1

9 points

Mar 22, 2011 10:18 AM in response to AppleBoy2345

Thanks! I knew that Firefox allows working offline, but too many other negatives. Turning off javascript, however, seems to do the trick for several of my open tabs and really helps with the bandwidth. So, a good partial fix - thanks! I'll check into Little Snitch and see how much "hassle" it involves.

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