The latest stable version of Google Chrome brings you two new functionalities to make your offline experience much better.
These new functionalities will ensure that you remain productive, even when you are no longer online. This is an excellent update, and one which will leave all other browsers far behind. This is another great addition to Google’s spate of new initiatives to improve user experience and to make Google Chrome more useful and relevant.
What is New
Google Chrome’s new functionalities come in the form of two new experimental flags available for Android users. These flags allow Google Chrome to retrieve content from a saved cache even when you are offline or are unable to connect to the internet. So if you were working and suddenly experience networking issues, you no longer have to stop what you are doing to wait for the connection to resume. Your browser will continue to send you content and data from its cache.
How to Enable the Flags
These features are not really out there. They are hidden behind two experiment flags, which have to be enabled. You can do it by simply typing ‘chrome://flags’ in your browser. This will let you start the offline enabling flag on your Chrome browser. Once the browser goes into the offline cache mode, it will try to retrieve the content from the saved caches. The benefits of this are twofold. First, your work will now never be disrupted and two, you will not lose your page when the connection goes offline. If the website cannot be reached due to poor network connectivity, you will not get an error page. Instead, you will continue to receive the cached content. The only down side is that if you are working on a website where the content keeps refreshing, you will not be able to access the new content till you get back on the network. You will only be able to see the cached content, because that is what your browser will relay to you.
Additional Features
Apart from the offline browsing through caches, the feature, when enabled, will also let you load older content using the ‘Load Stale Content’ button. This button will only be visible when you have the offline cache flag enabled. And they are still working on a network that is offline. You can also enable the second flag, which enables auto reload of offline pages. This feature makes it easier for you to reload pages automatically, when you have your network connection restored. This way, you would not have to keep accessing stale content and can move on to receiving fresh content when you are done. These experimental flags are only designed for Android as of now. However, there is hope that ti will soon be made available for all other platforms that can run Chrome. For Android smartphone users, this is great news because even if their network provider is unreliable, they are still able to view pages regardless of how their network is performing.
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