One of the most dramatic things we have experienced in the last 10 years is how we shifted from browsing the web mainly the desktop to the mobile phone. This also brought about a problem since we were inundated with so much information that you couldn’t read at a go so you had to save it somewhere. Instapaper and Pocket came to save the day by allowing us to save these webpages for offline reading but it seems now Google wants to disrupt their business.
On Android, Chrome ver. 55 brings about a whole suite of improvements where the headlining feature is the ability to add offline pages.
When you browse the web and you would like to save a webpage for offline use, Google has made it easy to store that information. You only need to tap on the options menu (flanked by 3 dots on the top right), click on the download button on the middle and Chrome will save that page for offline use. The page will be marked as offline as shown by the screenshot on the left and apparently you will be able to download HTML5 videos or audio this way as long as the website has no custom controls or it is a livestream.
Other improvements on Chrome include better RAM management and a new Web sharing API which will allow webpages to share content directly to your apps just like how Android does it.
Offering content offline has become quite the hit feature with apps of late. YouTube has it which I really love, Google Maps offers it and Netflix recently added offline access on its apps. This update will definitely make some of you not use Pocket or Instapaper anymore but some will be unfazed since they have tonnes of content saved on these apps.
