The cache display on the internal Firefox page is not comfortable to work with. All entries are lumped together on one large page, and while they provide basic information like item size, date and url, they lack manageability. There are no sorting options and no options to search the cached items, other than pressing Ctrl-f to utilize Firefox’s page search.

The default cache page has another weakness. It cannot be used to save files to the local hard drive.

Enter Cache Viewer Fx5, based on the original and discontinued Cache Viewer add-on.

Firefox users can access the extension’s interface with a click on Tools > Cache Viewer or with the shortcut Ctrl-Shift-C.

The interface lists all cache items, regardless of location, in the lower half of the interface. Each item is listed with its key, size, mime type, device and the date the data was fetched. All columns are sortable to find specific items fast, for instance all images that have been loaded into the cache or all files from a specific domain.

A right-click on a single item or multiple items opens a context menu with options to save the selection to the local hard drive, to delete the items or to open them in the default web browser.

The footer bar displays the number of memory and disk cache entries, and a reload button to quickly reload the cache.

The upper half of the screen contains an image preview area on the left and detailed information about the selected file on the right. This includes the data that is shown in the list of cached items plus information like the server and request method, expiration time (great for webmasters to check the caching directives of their websites) or the ETAG code.

CacheViewer Fx5 adds much needed features to the Firefox web browser, specifically the ability to search, sort and save cache entries need to be mentioned.

Firefox users can install the add-on from the official Mozilla Firefox website. The add-on is compatible with all versions of the Firefox browser from 4 on.

The Firefox add-on Cache Viewer offers a third option. It is basically a gui frontend for the browser cache viewer. Its advantage over the two original solutions to view the cache are numerous. This includes a visual preview of the cached item which is extremely helpful to identify images that have been placed in the cache.

It is possible to sort by url, size, mime type, cache location or date. Another handy option is the ability to use the search form to locate specific files or file types.

Additional information about a selected cache item are displayed next to the visual preview area including the expiration date and connection headers. A right-click on one or multiple images will open a context menu with options to save the selected items to the local hard drive, to delete them or to open them in the web browser.

Cache Viewer is available for Firefox 3 and can be downloaded from the Mozilla website.

Cache Viewer displays more information about the files cached and even previews them in a small window. Let us say you viewed some nice flash animations or listened to several mp3 files on some websites. It’s pretty time consuming to find out which files you need, unless you would be using cache viewer. You can sort all files in the cache by size (and other parameters) and flip through them until you find the ones that you want.

The extension offers some filters as well, you can filter parts of the file name or url to find files from a certain url for instance. It can run in it’s own window or in a tab.

The preview window is not limited to image files it is also able to display most flash files and other types of files as well.