Web Archives is a Firefox extension I find to be useful to extract and display a version of the page/link from various archived or cached sources. Sources include Archive Today, Google Cache and the Wayback Machine.
- The extension can be used from two locations:
- Button in the toolbar: click this to extract the currently open webpage in the current tab from one of the archive sources in the dropdown.
- Context menu: right-click on any link in a webpage and choose from archive sources to pull that link from. The extracted webpage is displayed in a new tab.
- My understanding of the settings:
- Search engines: enable the archive sources you want.
- Context menu: this is the menu displayed on right-click inside a webpage. You can see Web Archives listed at the bottom of this context menu.
- Visibility
- Show: Web archives appears in context menu on right-clicking anywhere in a page (means search this page) or on a link (means search that link).
- Show for links: Web archives appears in context menu on only when right-clicking a link.
- Hide: cannot be invoked through context menu.
- Search all engines
- From context menu: Open a bunch of tabs, one per archive source, for the chosen link. Not ideal.
- From submenu of context menu: Gives a drop down of your archive sources to choose from.
- Browser toolbar
- Search all engines
- From browser toolbar: clicking on toolbar button searches all engines!
- From browser toolbar popup: clicking on toolbar button shows dropdown button of search engines, plus an option to choose all engines. Choose which one you want.
- Open new tabs in the background: to open the extracted webpages in the background instead of browser jumping to those newly opened tabs.
- Open source development of the extension happens on Github here: https://github.com/dessant/web-archives