Explore A Website's History With WaybackFox
WaybackFox is an add-on for the Firefox web browser that enables you to open snapshots of the active site created by Archive.org.
Webmasters and researchers sometimes need to take a look at a website's history. This is for instance essential when buying a website to make sure that the seller has been running the website for the time claimed.
It may also be useful for other business transactions, say a partnership or evaluating the trustworthiness of a site.
The Wayback Machine at archive.org is the preferred way of checking how a website looked in the past. Not every website is included obviously but the most popular and visited websites usually are. The project takes snapshots of important pages of a site regularly -- the more the higher a site's popularity is -- and gives you access to those snapshots.
Explore A Website's History
WaybackFox is an interesting prototype add-on for Firefox that makes it a tad easier to access the Wayback Machine directly from the website that you want to look up.
The Firefox add-on places an icon in the Firefox status bar. This icon indicates whether the add-on is active or inactive. A click with the mouse button changes the status but that is all that can be done actively. The icon will change when a website with records is opened in the web browser.
A slider is added next to the icon that can be used to select one of the available history records of that website. The selected snapshot of the website is then automatically loaded in Firefox. A small overlay over the slider displays the dates as well as the total number of records on file.
WaybackFox makes it very easy to work with the Wayback Machine archive for websites, ideal for webmasters, business owners, researchers and nostalgia fans. The add-on is currently in experimental stage and compatible with all Firefox 3.x versions.
Update: The add-on has not been updated in a while and does not seem to be compatible with recent versions of the Firefox web browser anymore. We have removed the link, and suggest you take a look at the Passive Cache add-on instead which provides you with similar functionality.
All you need to do is right-click on a page or on a link and select the Passive Cache option to look it up in history. The add-on has not been updated since 2011 but it works just fine in recent versions of Firefox.
