Download And Use Wikipedia Offline With Firefox

Zipedia (via Instant Fundas) is actually the second (Wikipedia Taxi was the first) application that downloads Wikipedia and provides offline access to it’s contents. The main difference between Wikipedia Taxi and Zipedia is that the latter is a Firefox add-on which adds the Wikipedia offline search right into Firefox. The contents of Wikipedia can then be accessed by typing in wikipedia://wiki/ into the address bar. A keyword could probably help to reduce the address further.

The main benefit of this approach is that you can search Wikipedia while being offline. Other uses could be due to slow Internet connections or if Wikipedia is banned in the network.

The first step is the usual download of the Wikipedia articles. You can select any language version you like from the Wikipedia Dump. The import is started in the options of the add-on which also contains a download link to a recommended Wikipedia backup which has a size of more than 7 Gigabytes. Yes, the download can take a while unless you pick a different article backup. It’s also important to have enough space on the hard drive for the download.

Zipedia imports the Wikipedia download after downloading it which puts some strain on the system and takes a while as well. After that Wikipedia can be browsed by entering the address mentioned above in the Firefox address bar.

Images can’t be browsed and the search is only searching the titles of the articles and not the articles themselves which is a bit disappointing.