what is the purpose of Offline mode in a web browser?

Question

What is actually the purpose of offline mode. does it somehow manages the caching system of the browser. or it just skips the host resolution part, dont know for what. what probably the designer had in mind, when he developed the offline mode feature.

Answer 1

It's something that most of us wouldn't use very often, but it was useful in the past when we used dial-up modems (and especially for those of us who had time limited plans). You could connect to the internet, go to a website, quickly browse through everything you thought could be useful, disconnect, go to offline mode and then browse through the site as though you were connected (for everything was cached).

I didn't realise browsers still had them (I can't remember the last time I went to the File menu in Firefox though).

Answer 2

I think it's something from the old days, where connections were mostly dial-up (read: slow, and not always connected), and browsers relied on caching material off-line, so if you're not connected, you'd see the cached version in an off-line mode.

I guess it still applies to countries that still don't have DSL everywhere.