Sometimes you only need to access the contents of a site, but do not need to interact with it in other forms. This can be the case if you are researching a problem on the Internet, and the site that appears to have the solution posted is blocked on your computer.

You could now try the cached version if the search engine offers that to you, or hunt down for a working proxy to access the website.

Or, you could try the Text Mirror service which basically returns all textual contents of a web page to you.

All you need to do for that is to enter the website address into the page mirror form, check the I Accept TOS box and click Create.

It does not take long before a stripped down version of the page is presented to you on the Text Mirror website. Most formatting and style options are removed, which means that you cannot click on links (you actually do not see them at all) and that you do not see images or other media either.

You can change the font size and color scheme at the top which are remembered in future page look-ups. The biggest weakness of the service is that it does not display links at all, which can be problematic if the article that you have retrieved is divided onto multiple pages, or if you’d like to access a source cited in the article.

Text Mirror is a nice service to retrieve contents from single-article pages only. It is more likely that you can use the service under the radar for a longer time, as you do not retrieve that many files from the original site as you would with a proxy or direct access. That said, it is still likely that the service will get blocked in IT departments eventually. (via)

The Firefox extension FireMirror uses a similar technique as the last suggestion to download websites to the local hard drive. It basically is a website mirroring software that can automatically download a website based on the user’s parameters. The default setting will for instance download the active page plus every page that is linked from that page. The depth, which is the parameter that defines the number of pages that the website downloader will download, can be configured in the program’s options. The maximum depth is 10 and the minimum 0.

Additional options include configuring the timeout duration, disabling link replacements, enabling reports or configuring filters to include urls with a specific string. The configuration can be saved as a profile to speed up future download runs.

A basic browser is provided in another tab that can be used to browse the website that is being downloaded but it is usually a better idea to load the downloaded pages instead from the hard drive (the browser will retrieve pages that have not been downloaded).

The local pages use relative paths so that the downloaded websites and pages can be moved around without breaking the navigation.

The extension is provided in an early version. There is for instance no stop or cancel button which means the process can only be stopped by clicking on the x button on the extension window. The report is also not working at this time.

FireMirror could become an interesting alternative to desktop software like HTTrack. The add-on is compatible with Firefox 3.6+ and can be downloaded from the Mozilla website.

Update: The Fire Mirror extension is no longer available. We suggest to use HTTrack which is linked above to download entire websites.

Getleft is a simple website downloader that downloads the websites that you want to browse offline. All links will be converted to relative links means you don´t have links that point to urls. It´s able to resume downloads and also able to follow external links.