FOR those of us living on Internet rations in the developing world, with limited or no bandwidth, web browsing is a luxury. Time then to end the digital divide by sharing web pages offline with your friends using any one of seven or more, free or libre tools that will make life a lot easier without a dedicated connection. If you want an alternative to live Internet, have sporadic or intermittent service, or are confined to an Internet Cafe, then get cracking, by giving the online world to those who don’t have it, share your bandwidth, download entire web sites and share content with your community.
AmiPic Lite – http://www.altomsoft.com/ This is a Usenet reader, Web search, download tool and image viewer.
System Requirements: Windows 98/Me with IE 5.0 or higher; Windows 2000, XP and Vista
BackStreet Browser – http://www.spadixbd.com/backstreet/ This is a multi-threading Web site download and viewing program. By making multiple simultaneous server requests, this program will download an entire Web site or section of a site. It then saves all the files on your hard drive either in their native format or as a compressed ZIP file so you can view the data while offline.
System Requirements: Windows 95/98/2000/NT/ME/XP, 64 MB RAM, 2 MB Hard Disk Spac
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KybIE GetEmAll Lite – http://www.1keytools.com/web_accelerator.htm This program allows you to get selected links with one keypress and browse offline in Internet Explorer. You can select multiple threads or replies on a message board and get them all at once. Options on the KybIE menu can be checked to skip images, scripts and plugins on each fetched page. For search results you will often want to see first only the text from the page and then select only those pages for which you want to see images etc. Full working version. Restricted to 2 sets of 20 links.
System Requirements:
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HTTrack This open-source, offline browser allows you to download a Web site to a local directory. You can then recursively build all directories, extracting HTML, images and other files from the server to your computer. The program arranges the original site’s relative link structure. You simply open a page of the mirrored Web site in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. WebHTTRack is the GUI interface which uses the Midori browser and may have to be downloaded separately. Check your repository first.
System Requirements: Ubuntu/Linux/Unix/BSD
WinHTTTrack – http://www.httrack.com This offline browser allows you to download a Web site to a local directory. You can then recursively build all directories, extracting HTML, images and other files from the server to your computer. The program arranges the original site’s relative link structure. You simply open a page of the mirrored Web site in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online.
System Requirements: Windows 9x/NT/2000/XP release of HTTrack,
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PageNest (formerly WebStripper) Copy your favorite webpages to hard disk with PageNest. Give PageNest the address of a website and it will copy either the page, or the entire site (whichever you prefer) to your hard disk. It will create an exact copy of what you see in your browser including the text, html, images and css.
System Requirements: Micrsoft Windows 98, 2000, XP and Vista
Providus Web Scraper Lite – http://www.velocityscape.com This program performs Web data extraction into the hands of decision makers. You can create a custom-scraping template that will extract an entire Web site into an Excel spreadsheet.
System Requirements:
Web Scraper Lite is free.