Brave has become the first web browser to offer one-click access to archived versions of web pages by default thanks to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
If you visit a page that’s missing or been taken down, Brave will show a notification stating “Sorry, that page is missing.
Do you want to check if a saved version is available on the Wayback Machine?” Users can then scroll through older versions of the page, and while the Wayback Machine won’t have taken a snapshot of every website, it has archived over 900 billion URLs and 400 billion web pages over its lifetime.
The 404 (page not found) error is the the most common, but Brave will check 15 different HTTP error codes in in total, including: 404, 408, 410, 451, 500, 502, 503, 504, 509, 520, 521, 523, 524, 525, and 526.
“The Web is fragile.
Just as nations rise and fall, so do the Websites of your favorite news orgs, brands, companies, governments, etc.
Web pages are edited and pages are taken down.
Studies suggest the average life expectancy of a single Web page is anywhere from 44 – 100 days,” Mark Graham of the Internet Archive wrote in a statement.
The Internet Archive has previously kept DOS games alive and is linking digital books to Wikipedia citations, therefore ensuring the network that is the internet remains better connected.
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Native Wayback Machine support is only available via the Brave desktop browser for now, but users of other browsers can add similar functionality on Safari, Chrome, and Firefox via browser extensions.
