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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 has already been a fixed issue for probably over a decade with addons for Firefox. The addons are why Firefox became so popular in the first place. While its great that they want to include this functionality in the browser, why not just have a list of suggested addons when you install or update? Waste of time on their part...
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I see myself being blurry eyed and getting an archived page with outdated information and thinking it's up to date - and being fatigued enough where I just ignore the Wayback Machine's banner as just another advertisement.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
I think this is a horrible idea from the website perspective. What if we had to remove several pages/images from the website due to copyright issues? Or maybe the company is listing clients it doesn't represent anymore? Or other information that is no longer valid? They are assuming is a 404 is a mistake but what if it is intentional.
In other news, archive.org becomes inaccessible due to excessive load.
Seriously, it's slow already. Adding millions of hits on the site isn't going to help.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
and not a core feature of the browser...
This does not sound like something I would want. Browsers do too much caching already, imo. It makes it hard to troubleshoot issues as it is.
I am having trouble coming up with a scenario where I would want to see an old version of a page rather than the current page.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
For several reasons:
a) Any attempt to access a non-existing page that results in showing a page anyway, is basically fooling the user. Some (ehm.. read: many) users may even think that page still exists even though the original is gone. From a UI perspective that's just wrong even if convenient in many cases.
b) Access to old / archived versions of pages often comes in handy. And that is what the Internet Archive is for. But sometimes pages (or sites) are pulled for a reason. Sometimes good reason(s). Not all information ever placed on the internet needs to be preserved forever, imho.
c) If every 404 leads to a request to the Internet Archive, can they handle the extra load? Even if so, would the extra bandwidth / CPU / disk IO etc be a good use of the IA's limited resources? I very much doubt that, and perhaps Firefox maintainers should answer that question first before activating such a feature by default.
As one of many add-ons: sure why not. As a default feature: bad idea imho.
Personally I think it's a terrible idea. What's shown when I enter an URL should be between whoever designed the website and me. If a site is down, or a page is missing, I want to know about it.
The last thing I need is a bunch of programmers dreaming up ways to divert me from the real website to whatever is their idea of what I should be seeing. A typical example of a group of coders not knowing what to do with their time and messing with the basic functionality of their application, if you ask me.
So: great to see that you're having fun Mozilla programmers, but make sure to implement this an an optional feature and keep it out of my way unless I explicitly activate it. Otherwise I'll be looking for a new browser. Fair warning.
Yes, it'll be a copy of michelle obama's website.
What happens when I use a 404 status in a web service to signal that the requested resource couldn't be found - the front end handles 404 gracefully and informs the user, updates the UI, etc. Will it still return a 404 status, but inject a whole load of unexpected content?
That's a BAD idea for several reasons: 1 - too much load on archive.org 2 - loss of privacy 3 - most users may want to know if an URL/page does not exist anymore
If a page doesn't exist I *WANT* a 404 error. Not some redirected crap. If I want to find a cached version of the page I'll do so myself. Google search results offer a cached version or there's always the wayback machine.
I wish all these idiots would stop their inane "helping". All their ideas are just "Clippified" crap.
is there anyone out there who thinks this is a BAD idea? I mean, an error is an error, hiding it usually causes more harm than good.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
Yes, it'll be a copy of michelle obama's website.
Melanoma Trump didn't copy Michelle's speech, she um, "creatively re-purposed" her work by quoting it verbatim!
Like when I duplicate a $100 bill and spend it at the store, it's like an art project, I'm not copying it!
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I hate when my ISP's DNS redirects 404's, I certainly don't want my browser doing it.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
That's really bad. Just imagine you check the conditions of a bank or some prices of a store and it turns out that the information was obsolete.
Maybe it's because I am a SW developer, but I want to see errors, when they occur. Otherwise, how can anybody hope to correct them?
.... but I checked the Travel advice for Turkey and it said that it was fine!
It would be more transparent, and send less load to archive.org for Firefox to give the 404 error but then also include a link to the archived version, clearly marked. There is no good reason to hide the fact that the page is not available.
Typically one would want to know they are looking at a stale copy. I'd suggest a prompt such as:
Table-ized A.I.
How about just no. Some things are broken for a reason. Let's leave it that way. Just because you can doesn't always mean you should.
How is this NOT going to cause massive amounts of confusion.
I pity the first person who buys a piece of property that had a popular establishment that's long gone except for it's archived page... who gets subjected to an endless barrage of:
Person: "Where's wacky world?
Owner: "Wacky world burned to the ground with no survivors in 2011... Sorry man"
Person: "But I was just on their website!"
Owner: "Yeah, your browser just skull fucked you."
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
The first rule of Usenet applies to the Wayback machine in spades.
More attention on it especially something like this doing the lookups automatically that make it seem part of browser the more site owners feel compelled to exclude their content from the machine as a matter of course or worse lawyers for sites and third parties third parties try their hand at nonsensical legal theories.
http://www.netdisaster.com/des...
TFA says it's an add-on. There is no indication that it will even ship with Firefox by default (Mozilla has made other extensions that aren't pre-packaged into Firefox).
Now, it's totally fine to complain when bloatware is added directly to the browser like Hello and Pocket (I would defend Reader though). But TFA does not indicate in any way that this will be the case.
What about subtraction?
There's plenty of extensions in the wild right now that are filled with security and PR problems, why don't those stop you?
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.
Can I suggest removing the "tinfoil hat me" plugin and replacing the "They are always watching me" plugin with "Lets watch cat videos"?
The combination of tinfoil hat and watching me plugins overadvertises the "building a doomsday bunker in your backyard".
Isn't this the same as google offering to show you a previously cached page, but using the way back archive and offloading the storage and traffic costs on them while providing no revenue or benefit? Yes, that's exactly what this is. Lets let the wayback machine pony up the storage and traffic costs, as well as IO and Compute. That is what some people would call, a dick move. No different than linking images from article A into your article so site A has to pay the hosting and traffic costs, cracked did a funny article on this very subject.
So once you hit the archived site does the add-on change the links so that you don't stay on the archived site?
Gordon Bell of DEC had a sign in his office, "Better is the enemy of Good".
Sure he did. It meant that to sell a VAX architecture, the PDP-11 architecture could not be sustained. Anyhow, despite the beauty of those machines, DEC got sucked into Compaq, and thence into HP. Crap reigns supreme.
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
Every browser already has this functionality (i.e. arbitrarily alter requests from the server before the user can interact with them).
That's not a confidence scheme, Officer, it's performance art!
That's not a confidence scheme, Officer, it's performance art!
That's what I told the judge, and he sentenced me to conduct a 3-to-5 year "performance art" piece in prison with time off for "creative ability" or something.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
It's not a confidence scheme, Officer, it's a self esteem building scheme!
Great, how is 503'ing archive.org any better?
That's not a confidence scheme, Officer, it's performance art!
That's what I told the judge, and he commissioned a 3-to-5 year "performance art" piece complete with living accommodations, meals and housekeeping
Got to keep in character.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
That's really bad. Just imagine you check the conditions of a bank or some prices of a store and it turns out that the information was obsolete.
If you make financial decisions based on old copies of a page, knowing that the current page is unavailable, you deserve whatever you get.
"Hey I've got a great idea! If we do this little thing our product will be even better!"
They do some little thing no one asked for, to half a billion installed browsers.
That thing in no way affects their bottom line.
But somewhere else, the bottom drops out of something else and something precious is broken.
Please don't do this.
So Wayback is going to be the error page for every damned malformed or mis-typed link? That is abuse and attack.
I can see Wayback hit like a gigaton of bricks as people who have no deep interest in the content they're trying to access say "gee, what's this? All these changes! What did it look like in 2009?" And often the last crawl is NOT the one with real content. There is no substitute for knowing what you're doing and what you are looking for. There is no way to dumb down the process. And what about those [stupid] pre-load and crawler plugins? Will they hit Wayback too?
And more site owners will drop in that magic blip into robots.txt that will shut Wayback access for good, even the pages in the database that are there ready to serve. It's bad enough that domain squatters often block Wayback.
And even the constant stream of reflected robots.txt lookups will hit Wayback like a malevolent attack. Do you [Mozilla] even know how Wayback works?
Add-ons like Resurrect Pages are the way to go. Only folks with a real and deep interest will go further. And THAT level of traffic is what Wayback can support.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>