Despite ever expanding web of internet connectivity, no modern web app can expect not to work decently when offline.
Testing offline functionality, though, can be a bit of a bummer for people like me who develop almost exclusively in/for Google Chrome – unlike the old Internet Explorer, it doesn’t have a quick to access ‘Offline Mode’.
Not being a professional developer, I didn’t have extensive tools at my service to test my app in offline mode, and switching WiFi off-on was becoming tiresome. This is the solution I’ve ended up with for offline testing in Chrome:
In extension’s settings, set up a proxy to a non-existent IP Address, preferably on our local network. We could even set it to localhost/127.0.0.1 if we aren’t running a server on local machine.
Proxy SwitchySharp Extension Settings
Now every time we need to switch to offline mode, all we have to do is go to the extension’s browser button, and select the local-profile we created.
Browser Button – Select proxy to go offline.
When we want to go back on-line, we just select ‘Direct Connection’ or, if we have a corporate proxy, then that.
That’s it! No more toggling WiFi to test offline mode for our web apps.