Reading deleted pages with Mozilla

After reading a MetaFilter discussion of a FAQ page on Ralph Nader's campaign Web site, I checked back later to find out that the page had been deleted (presumably in response to the attention it was getting).

This brings up a cool Mozilla trick that probably works in Internet Explorer: When you know a page that you read recently has been deleted or altered, you can bring up the last version you saw by doing this before visiting the site again: Go offline by choosing File, Work Offline, then click the link. You'll see the cached copy of the page.

I used this to resurrect Nader's FAQ. Because I hadn't visited yet to see that the FAQ was deleted, I still had a copy in my browser cache that could be retrieved easily.

2003/12/03 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Comments

A useful trick, but what you really want is to be able to get a 404 from a page and then have Mozilla dredge the cache.

I should mention that to them. Yep, I should do that...

#1 · craig ewert · -1/11/30

Thanks, Roger! This page had been deleted by the time I saw it mentioned online, and I'm glad somebody saved their cached copy.

#2 · Brian Carnell · 2003/12/05