BackStreet Browser

Whenever you need a piece of info and you need it fast, nothing gets the job done better than a search over the web. However, you might not always have constant access to the Internet and for large documents it's better to save files locally. In this regard, applications such as BackStreet Browser put a practical environment at your disposal to save all data needed from websites for a clean offline browsing experience.

A few seconds in and you realize the application is not much to look at, both in terms of design and depth of its feature set. However, you quickly get the hang of it, with your workspace being well-organized. Several panels let you quickly browse through project items, view corresponding details and access or preview files.

First of all, you need to configure several project settings so the application knows how and where to connect. A default destination folder can be set for your projects, with an option to configure maximum link depth, as well as whether or not to replace files upon updates.

You can apply custom filter conditions to both files and URLs in order to protect your computer or skip content that's not of interest. For enhanced security, connection options give you the possibility to connect via a proxy server, with requirements only for credentials and address.

Once general and project settings are configured, the process starts automatically. The list of files is updated in real time, with entries stored in a table along with info such as name, type, size, URL and a few more.

Navigation options are a little shallow and you manually have to go through all files to find items of need. This is because there is no integrated search engine to speed up finding files. What's more, you can take advantage of a browser view to analyze content, but links need to be fully downloaded for the preview to properly load.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that BackStreet Browser is a lightweight but practical application for downloading websites to have info at hand all the time. Setting up a project is done in a matter of seconds, and the intuitive design lets anyone quickly accommodate. The set of features is a little poor, but gets the job done well overall.