Just a little bit over a year ago, I wrote about the Internet Archive’s Smart 404 Handler, which aimed to help site owners put an end to useless 404 Not Found errors on their own site by offering a link to the content (if available) on the Wayback Machine. Now, the Internet Archive has set out to solve the problem of useless 404 Not Found errors for everyone with a new extension for Firefox, for Chrome, and for Safari!
With the extension installed, if you encounter a 404 (or really any from the range of “unavailable” errors) for content that exists in the archive, you’ll see this very handy pop-up:
As that button describes, clicking it will take you to the archived page, so you’ll never have to wonder about what you were missing. But, that’s not all! Do you feel like a page looks a little bit different today? Are you feeling nostalgic for how pages looked when they were first published? Just open the extension in your browser’s toolbar for even more fun:
Thanks to this new extension, and the Wayback Machine’s hundreds of billions of archived pages, the experience of missing out on lost content could finally be a thing of the past! Also, if you find this extension useful, don’t forget that the Internet Archive needs donations to be able to provide all of that for free.