Loading up a website without a connection established is a real shame. Instead of the information you were looking for, Chrome shows you a dinosaur and an error message. You're left sitting there, out of luck.

But if there's a cached version lying around, Chrome can display that instead. There's an experimental flag available that turns this feature on. Just look for the "Enable Show Saved Copy Button" that you can find at chrome://flags/#show-saved-copy. (This applies to Chrome Beta and Dev. For Chrome stable, see update.) Afterwards, you should see the button at the bottom of the screen.

Left: Disabled, Right: Enabled

This feature isn't brand spanking new. Googler François Beaufort showed it off on the desktop version of the browser back in March. But recently, a reader reached out to us once the "Show Saved Copy" button started appearing on webpages for him automatically. While we haven't observed the behavior kicking in for us, others have. Either way, the functionality works the same once you enable the flag.

Left: Showed Saved Copy flag, Right: Cached page

For the time being, you need Chrome Beta or Dev to take advantage of this feature. Those of you running the stable version that came with your device can get a more experimental build from the links below.

UPDATE: 2015/05/20 12:16pm PDT BY

Just kidding. Under the stable version of Chrome, this feature goes by a different name. As a commenter has pointed out, you can enable it by going to chrome://flags/#enable-offline-load-stale-cache.

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