Safari Reading List gains offline-viewing ability for reading aficionados

May 23, 2012 15:17 GMT  ·  By

The latest Mountain Lion build seeded to developers contains a new feature that will delight web surfers - offline reading. Safari’s Reading List feature now offers the option to save content for later viewing, even when not connected to the Internet.

A feature shared by services like Instapaper, Readability, and Pocket, offline reading is quite a handy thing to have, regardless of the platform you’ve employed to do some reading.

Say you’re browsing the web on your desktop Mac and stumble upon some great reading material. You suddenly realize that you’re late for a hangout with your buds, but you want to catch up on that reading later on in the evening when you come back to your desktop.

In OS X Mountain Lion, you’ll be able to save that material with a couple of clicks, and perhaps even a keyboard shortcut. All the content goes straight to your Reading List in Safari, and it’ll be there for you when you arrive home.

“Designed with the Mac in mind, Safari emphasizes browsing, not the browser,” says Apple on the marketing pages of OS X Lion, the current Mac OS iteration.

“In new full-screen view, the browser frame is only a pixel wide, and you can hide almost the entire interface if you choose. So there’s nothing to distract you from an article, video, or photo album,” Apple explains.

“Navigating web pages is easy with new trackpad gestures; flip through web pages with a swipe, and double tap or pinch the trackpad to zoom in on text or images.”

“Safari also features Reader, which lets you peruse articles sans annoying ads,” Apple continues. “Don’t have time to finish what you’ve started? Reading List lets you save links to articles and other web pages for later, and iCloud keeps your Reading List up to date across all your devices. Since pages render fast in Safari, you won’t miss a minute of the web.”