Inspired in part by ploum's Offpunk, I added a new little feature to the latest version (0.1.10) of my gemini client diohsc.
The new version adds a 'fetch' command which immediately downloads the targets and adds them to the queue (diohsc's analogue of AV-98's tour). They are then stored in memory, so going through these entries in the queue requires no network activity.
Examples:
So this is kind of analogous to loading every link in a new tab, which is what you might do in a more conventional browser when you want to get all net use out of the way at once.
This is a rather primitive approach to offline browsing, in particular because it saves nothing to disk. It's no replacement for Offpunk. Still it seems useful, both for those times when you may lose your net connection, and in general to let you get all connection delays out of the way in one go. (Requests are still made serially and you will still be prompted occasionally to trust certificates; adding background requests would be too deep and complexifying a change for too little payoff.)
A handy side-effect is that if you e.g. add the current page with "a", it will be added to the end of the queue in its fetched form, so won't be rerequested when you get to it. Useful when you come across something which you want to read, but not immediately.
Hopefully this is the last non-trivial feature I'll ever add to diohsc.