There is an old proverb – haste makes waste, which basically means that we end up making many mistakes when we hurry up something and it results in a waste of our time. It can be seen in action when we are in a hurry using the Firefox web browser and close the tabs that we were not supposed to close. Then we regret that we did not save the image, PDF document or other details from a website before closing Firefox.
Chances are that those files are still stored in the Firefox cache and can be recovered or viewed easily using a free tool from Nir Sofer called MZCacheView. This tool can scan the cache directory for any Firefox installation or portable Firefox browser and display you its contents in full. This we can easily read the Firefox cache even after we have closed the browser or when we are not online.
MZCacheView, like all the other tools from Nir Sofer, comes in a ZIP archiver. We can extract it to a folder and launch MZCacheView.exe from there. The archive also comes with a help file which we can use for reference when using this little utility.
As soon as it is launched, it automatically finds the cache folder for the default Firefox installation and starts scanning it for various files. If you do not want it to scan the installed version of Firefox and want to scan a portable Firefox folder, then you have to first stop the scanning and then pick the cache folder manually. For selecting the cache folder, you can select File → Select Cache Folder from the menubar or just press the F9 key. You have to select the cache2 folder inside the Firefox profile.
After the scanning is complete you can see all the files inside the cache of Firefox browser. The program lists all entries and provides you with all information such as file type, name, origin or size. You can right-click on any of these entries and choose various actions such as copy that file to a folder, open it in Firefox, copy the URL and more.
If you have been using Firefox for many years and have never cleared the cache, then it becomes very hard to scroll through the entries from the entire. But MZCacheView offers you a simple search function using which you can search for specific files.
You can download MZCacheView from https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/mozilla_cache_viewer.html.