Firefox Cache It Add-on

The information on a website that is temporarily or permanently unaccessible is not necessarily lost. Internet caches crawl the web and store the information. The most popular cache is probably Google Cache which automatically caches pages when Google Bot pays a visit. Technical difficulties are the main reason why a website is temporarily unaccessible. This could be a server outage, a transfer of the domain or content and to many connections (from the Digg or Slashdot effect).

This naturally means that the contents of such a website will be accessible at a later time which is not the case if a website was permanently deleted. Your best bet to access the contents of inaccessible websites is to use the aforementioned caches. Using them manually however requires some knowledge of their url structure or location on the web.

The Firefox Cache It add-on provides an easier way to access cached versions of a page on the Internet. It adds itself to the right-click menu and all it takes to open a cached version is to select the cache. from a list of available ones. Five Caches are currently available: Coral CDN, Google Cache, MSN Cache, Dot Cache and the Wayback Machine.

A default cache can be selected which is just one click away in the right-click menu. The user can also select where the cached version of the page should be loaded, for example in the same tab, a new tab or new window.