Facebook has come up with a way for mobile users to read and comment on stories in the News Feed offline in a move that Facebook says is to bring the most relevant stories to those people with crawling, non-loading 2G connections.

Facebook says it is “now testing an update in which we look at all the previously downloaded stories present on your phone that you have not yet viewed and rank them based on their relevance.” Once online again the new stories you haven’t seen will be ranked normally, says Facebook.

While liking and sharing posts offline has been available for a while, you can now comment on stories too, Facebook reported. So if you are eager to compose a rant or congratulate your friend on finishing her marathon, you can do so without an Internet connection and the comment will appear just as soon as you get back online.

Facebook says the move is mostly due to people in emerging markets coming online at a “staggering rate,” and those people much of the time are on 2G connections. But even if you have a good connection in an online-vibrant market, there are times – going through tunnels or riding the subway – when your connection gets cut.

This comes on the back of Facebook’s 2G Tuesdays that the company introduced in October, whereby employees at the company are encouraged to battle with a bad connection for some part of the day. In an interview with Business Insider, Facebook’s Engineering Director Tom Alison said this was to shorten the “empathy gap” and give employees some idea of what it’s like to have their patience tested.

Only last month Facebook reported that it was building better connectivity for “another billion people” in emerging markets, so it looks like world domination is on the cards for the social media behemoth.

Facebook didn’t give a direct time that users will see this new feature but said it will be rolled out slowly, first to Android users and later to iOS.

Photo credit: mkhmarketing via Flickr