View Old Versions of Webpages in Firefox with Wayback Machine Extension

When websites first became popular with people in early 90s, they were very plain and simple. Back then HTML 2.0 and HTML 3.2 were used to create websites and constituted mostly of texts and small images. While millions of the websites created in the 90’s have totally disappeared from the internet, many of them still exist to this day. As you can expect these websites that journeyed from HTML 2.0 to HTML 5.0 have totally changed in both appearance and content.

If you want to see how a web page looked all those years ago, then you can use the Wayback Machine invented by the Internet Archive. It has archived web pages from many different websites fetched from time to time. Obviously, owning to the size of the internet, it is not able to archive pages from all the websites but it still manages to store the archives from a large number of websites.

Wayback Machine for Firefox

Usually, you would visit the internet archive website and type in the domain name or webpage address to see all the archived pages stored by the Wayback Machine. But as a Firefox user, you can make it much easier to use the Wayback Machine through a Firefox extension. The Wayback Machine extension for Firefox adds an icon in the Firefox toolbar. Anytime you want to see if Wayback Machine has any archived pages for the currently open website, then you can click on this Wayback Machine icon and click on Recent Version or First Version.

The Recent Version shows you the most recent webpage version stored by Wayback Machine while the First Version shows you the oldest version of the webpage version stored. If you want to make a request to store the current version of webpage, then you can click on the Save Page Now.

Conclusion: Wayback Machine archives can be easily accessed through Firefox using the Wayback Machine extension. It can not only show the archived pages, but can also make a request to store the current version of webpage.

You can get the Wayback Machine extension for Firefox from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wayback-machine_new/.