How to enable offline reading feature in Chrome + Tips and Tricks

The last couple of years have been proving quite fruitful for the developers and users of Chrome, a web browser that dominates the market on PC and mobile due to Google’s ‘harassment and demolition’, but also because it is the best in terms of compatibility and performance … Even when it is in both cases of benefits inherited by the main derivatives of Chromium.

Beyond the outright technology, however, unlike the rest of Chromium derivatives, which try to offer a personalized experience that attracts the user, Chrome has for many years been a very bland browser in terms of functions: If you wanted something, you had to look for an extension that would supply it. All that statism is behind us, thankfully.

Thus, a couple of years into this part we have seen how little news is coming to Chrome that you may like more or less, but that are a sign that they are paying more attention to details than before. Functions such as the extensions menu, multimedia controls or groups of tabs; functions that travel a previous path before reaching the general public.

Offline reading in Chrome

This is one of those novelties: offline reading in Chrome or, better defined by the term in English popularized by services that save articles to read later, read it later. Like those mentioned, which no longer need to be activated manually because they are available in the stable version of the browser, this will also be it, but if you want to go ahead and take advantage of it …

We put you on the track: the feature has just entered the development version of Chrome, but can now be activated manually in the stable version of Chrome 88 for PC and Android. We have tested it, it works without problems and the utility it provides is interesting if you use Chrome and you are one of those who usually write articles to read them calmly later.

In effect, it is a function somewhat similar to services such as the one that gave the phenomenon its name, Read it Later, now known as Pocket and integrated into Firefox as part of Mozilla. With one important difference: the articles are saved in the browser itself. That is, it is not that comprehensive, but it is still useful because it allows you to read those articles without an Internet connection.

In fact, Google has raised this function very intelligently, and it is that these articles to read later are neither more nor less than bookmarks, with the addition of being able to access them even if you don’t have a connection. Something that can be done by hand, but has been simplified by Google for the enjoyment of the staff.

Once the function is activated, you can choose to save a page as a bookmark or add it to the reading list Through the same menu or action: on the PC, using the add marker button; on your mobile, through the menu or by clicking on a link. What changes with respect to the device is the place where you will find the saved articles, the so-called reading list.

On the PC, the reading list is in the bookmarks bar, next to “Other bookmarks”; on mobile, in its own highlighted section on the bookmarks section.

And there is no more. Everything is to try it to see if it convinces you. Are you interested? How to do it:

Put in internal URL «chrome://flags/#read-later»In the address bar, activate it (« Enabled »), restart the browser and you are ready to use the function. To reverse the change, the same but in reverse (“Default”).

It is still too early to know how long it has left in the oven before opening to the general public, but the function already does its job. By request, his thing would be that the articles are saved with the typical “simplified view” so that the reading is more pleasant, since what is saved is the page as is and is a bit ugly.

Of course, this is a feature that comes to Chrome because it has been implemented in Chromium and therefore all its derivatives have access to it. But it doesn’t work on all of them, at least for now.