Web Archives for Chrome

Web Archives is a small Chrome extension that will work wonders for those who need to access websites' older versions and archived variants. It is a general overview and cumulative addition of scattered information found across more than ten search engines.

Web Archives is more like a web service as it is a cross-browser utility. The initiative is an open-source project built with Internet tools (using JavaScript, HTML, the Vue.js framework). Like most projects of its kind, it is an open environment that leaves place for improvements via external collaborations, which is excellent for clarity.

The small-packed tool won't saddle your processes at all — it is easy to install, you don't need to sign up/register, it has a minimal impact on your computing and resources consumption, and has a short adoption time — you will learn what it does while using it.

The tool will display in one place the web's condensed information about websites and their older versions. How? Simple as that. Everything on the Internet is usually remembered. For all webpages, there is stored information (the cache data) on the servers that hosted those websites; also, there is another type of data, stored by browsers — the archived versions of a website. Web Archives will make all this information available for you in one place.

Web Archives has plenty of sources to give you a general, accurate, and non-arbitrary overview over a website's old forms. Some of the most important sources the service has available are Wayback Machine (all), Google Cache (text-only), Bing Cache, Yandex Cache, Archive.is (all), Memento Time Travel, WebCite, Yahoo Japan Cache, and Qihoo 360 Search Snapshot.

You can customize the extension's functioning by selecting which sources you are interested in, ordering them, using drag-and-drop, based on their priority, from the most important (the first) to the least significant (the last). Other parameters like extension visibility and browser toolbar functionalities can equally be set.

To summarize, Web Archives is your go-to Chrome extension if you need to access old websites' data fast and effortlessly. The Internet always has a way of remembering; even when obsolete, full websites' interfaces are not available, you will still find plenty of information that can help you understand how a given website/webpage looked and what it was all about at a given moment in time.