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Firefox Will Try To Show You Saved Archive Of a Page Instead Of 404 Error (ndtv.com)
Firefox has announced a new add-on dubbed No More 404s in its Test Pilot platform which aims to change the way we see 404 links on the web. The add-on, Firefox says, replaces the Error 404 from missing webpages, and replaces them with saved archives from the Wayback Machine. From a report on Gadgets 360: Normally, when presented with a missing link, the browser shows the 404 error. However, Mozilla's No More 404s add-on will give Firefox users the choice to see old Internet snapshots saved in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. This is especially handy for users trying to do research or just digging up some old graves out of curiosity. For now, this add-on is only available in Firefox's experimental Test Pilot platform, with no details on availability for regular Firefox users. Interested users can install the test version here. Apart from this, the Test Pilot platform also introduced improved search results through the Awesome Bar, redesigned the Tabs bar to the side, and even tweaked the history feed.
This is the one time - exception to the rule - where I would like a banner to be obnoxious.
I see myself being blurry eyed and getting an archived page with outdated information and thinking it's up to date - and being fatigued enough where I just ignore the Wayback Machine's banner as just another advertisement. Actually, even when I'm alert, I ignore all banners as just being some dipshit advertisement - even with adblock on, some make it through.
If you use the search box it's quite easy to get a cached page view via Google. cache: + url in the search box will redirect you to the cached version of the url, if it exists.
Example:
cache:https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/08/05/1439229/firefox-will-try-to-show-you-saved-archive-of-a-page-instead-of-404-error
If it has truly been deleted then a 410 Gone should be issued. However, that means you have to have a record of what was deleted that is checked to issue that instead of a 404 Not Found. That's more effort with no real gain.
Users should only get 301 Permanent Redirect or 302 Found if the resource exists elsewhere. If it doesn't then redirectng them to something other than what they were expecting, *especially* the index page of the site, is incorrect.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
TFA in fact says it is an add-on.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/resurrect-pages/
Not sure why it's never been very popular. It's one of the most useful add-ons I have. Unlike the proposed add-on in TFA which only uses the Wayback Machine, Resurrect Pages lets you pick from four possible sources (Google cache in full and text-only mode for those annoying pages which won't show the text until all the nonexistent pics finish loading first, Wayback Machine, WebCite, archive.is) for a cached version of the page. There used to be more, but I guess some of those archiving projects died.