In the quest to read articles on the web, we have had that moment where you find a useful site and the bookmark feature allowed us to revisit it later easily. However, we have moved on from that since we have such services like Pocket or Instapaper that allows you to save articles for offline reading.
Last year, Google gave Chrome the ability to download webpages so that you can view them while offline. Now today, they have announced improvements in the quest to make it even easier to do this.
First, there is a new download link button. When you see a website that you would like to view later, just long press on the link and select “download link”. This is also available when you long press the article suggestion on the tab page.
Also, the “Download Page Later” button that you notice when you’re not connected to the Internet can be used to download the page of interest and it will be downloaded when you get back online.
Google has also added a new offline badge where when you open a new tab, you will see the articles that you have downloaded having this badge. This will allow you to read all the articles you have been saving over time without the need to reconnect once again.
This feature can be beneficial for the kind of person who finds interesting content online but is unable to read them at the moment or for that person who has a limited data bundle balance who would want a scenario where he or she doesn’t need to reload the page multiple times.
Google reveals that more than 45 million web pages are downloaded every week so you can be they want to keep that rate going up high. This is the kind of update that should worry Pocket or Instapaper since they are in the business of saving articles.
This follows an update by Google where they finally released the 64bit version of Chrome for Desktop out of beta.
