Browsing the Web can be a time-consuming and often expensive process. This is true even if your Internet service provider offers a fast proxy server, you still have to be on-line to access the information.
That is where off-line browsing tools offer a salve to heal our financial wounds. Off-line browsing covers a range of tools for storing Web documents to be read, re-read and browsed off-line.
Many off-line browsing tools let you retrieve documents automatically to be read off-line, just like many of us read and write our e-mails off-line, only reconnecting to send and receive.
Even without a specialised off-line browsing tool, both Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer offer built-in caches for rudimentary off-line browsing.
In Communicator (Internet Explorer is similar): choose Preferences from the Edit menu; choose the Advanced option; choose Cache - set your disk cache to a suitable large size (between 5000 and 10,000 kilobytes); under 'Document in cache is compared to document on network:' choose 'Never'.
With these settings in place, you can connect to the Internet, quickly load the pages you want to read, and then disconnect. Then, you can re-visit the pages by typing their addresses or tapping the 'Back' or 'Forward' buttons.