Offline Web Reader that works?!?!?

bsd107

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Oct 31, 2012
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I travel quite a bit, and want to be able to save web pages for reading offline on my Surface Pro. I'm not talking about RSS feeds, but instead I like browsing on my windows desktop, or Surface Pro, and when I see a page I want to read later want to save it for offline reading later.

Both Instapaper and Pocket do exactly what I need to do (with Pocket being superior as it also will download pictures).

The problem is, neither has a decent client for either Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8. I've been using "Stacks for Instapaper" for well over a year now, and "Pouch" for over six months. Both are incredibly buggy, and I've finally reached my limit of tolerance and am now giving up on them. I'm sick of trying to load up Pouch on an airplane and having it instantly crash upon opening if I do not have an active WiFi connection, and it's ignoring some random fraction of articles that I have added to Pocket. And Stacks is only slightly better - it tends to work on my WP8, aside from lots of crashes, but on my Surface Pro when it crashes it deletes whatever article I was just reading - and it crashes often. Windows 8.1 seemed to make both of these programs crash even more often - including the instant crash on opening if I am not on WiFi (e.g. on a plane).

Is there ANY similar client or service that actually WORKS on Windows 8/RT ?

I was excited to see the Reader store app included by Microsoft with Windows 8.1, as it gives a beautiful presentation, but then I immediately found that it, for some unknown reason does NOT actually cache the articles for offline viewing - it only essentially bookmarks the articles, and to view them you have to have an active internet connection!

Any recommendations or ideas?

I am so fed up with this situation that I'm actually seriously considering buying an iPad. I got the Surface Pro at launch (as well as the Lumia 920 at launch), but I have hit my limit and am done with carrying around a tablet around with me that will not even let me do basic caching and reading of articles when offline. It's a first class device in terms of hardware and OS (at least once Win8.1 came out with the major upgrade to the Mail app), but if the app ecosystem is so limited that it can't do simple things like offline web page viewing, I can't keep overlooking the limitations and will need to buy a device that will do what I need...
 

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