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So, I'm kind of falling in love with Safari 4 (sorry, Firefox). However, I'm the type who likes my browser cache. Doing a little bit of Googling, it seems Safari does have an offline mode like Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera (where you can view cached web pages offline), but I haven't found any way to activate it and just navigating to web pages with no net connection seems not to do it either.

So, does Safari even really have an offline mode, and if so, how does one use it?

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does Safari even really have an offline mode?

No.

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  • Found by experience?
    – Nathaniel
    Commented Dec 21, 2009 at 1:22
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"does Safari even really have an offline mode?"

Yes and no.

It doesn't have an offline mode like Firefox .. which works directly from the cache - but what it does have is the ability to save webpages as full offline html images WITHOUT 3rd party software. These are called webarchives and are known by the extension ".webarchive" These files work completely offline - no internet connection required. As I mentioned before they are native to Safari, thus no need for 3rd party programs like (Scrapbook for Firefox) and webarchives are better than Firefox's or IE's "Save as HTML complete" because the Webarchive is a SINGLE file with all the goodies all packed inside of it. Downside is that it requires safari if you want to read it. But if you use Max OS X there is a quicklook plugin that can also read webarchives without opening Safari. So your best bet is that, if you need to save web data for offline viewing, select File > Save As .. Choose "Web Archive" and save it in a place you'll remember. You can probably even open them and bookmark them in a webarchives folder if you want to keep them for a long time, for quick and easy access.

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  • And Safari webarchive != MHTML like Internet Explorer or Opera use.
    – Nathaniel
    Commented Apr 21, 2010 at 4:32
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I'd like to add that technically Safari DOES have an offline mode, you just can't enable it. When using HTML5 and a site that's defined a cache manifest, those files will be available when Safari is offline. However the only way to put it on "offline mode" is to disconnect/disable any network connection from the computer. There's no "work offline" option like in Firefox.

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  • What about the "drag to homescreen" thing on iPad or iPhone? Doesn't that force the offline caching? I'm researching this, it's hard to find information.
    – user30033
    Commented Dec 14, 2010 at 0:27
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One simple way to your solution is just stop the server you are using, safari will switch to offline mode automatically.

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    What do you mean by "stop the server"?
    – Nathaniel
    Commented Jan 27, 2012 at 2:38
  • @Nathaniel Raheel probably thought "stop who serve the data"
    – Bruno
    Commented Jun 14, 2019 at 16:13

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