### 3.4 Offline browsing

In an ideal world, all machines would have perfect connectivity to the network at all times and servers would never crash. In the real world, it may be necessary to avoid hitting the network and have Polipo serve stale objects from its cache.

Setting `proxyOffline` to `true` prevents Polipo from contacting remote servers, no matter what. This setting is suitable when you have no network connection whatsoever.

If `proxyOffline` is false, Polipo's caching behaviour is controlled by a number of variables documented in Tweaking validation.