Wayback Machine Browser Extension

★★★★☆

Useful for when you want to make sure the pages you’re reading will still be around in some form in the future, and to easily get at additional context.

Privacy Alert: It checks every page you view against the Wayback Machine, so turn it off when you’re not using it! There really isn’t a good way around this without downloading their entire index as part of the extension. But that’s the only way it can show you how many times the page has been archived, or automatically save a copy, or automatically check for archives when the current page isn’t found.

If you enable auto-save, be sure to add to the exclusions list so it doesn’t waste time trying to archive your webmail or control panel.

There is a private mode where it doesn’t do anything until you ask it to. But that leaves you with essentially the same features as a pair of bookmarklets to check or save the current page.

I’ve used the Firefox add-on with, well, Firefox, and the Chrome extension with both Vivaldi and Arc.

Alternative: Bookmarklets

I’ve also been using these bookmarklets from Wikipedia, which don’t need an extension and work on just about any desktop browser. (Except Arc, where I wrote a “boost” back in the early beta period to add buttons to every page.)

Load archives of the current page:

javascript:void(window.open('https://web.archive.org/web/*/'+location.href.replace(/\/$/, '')));

Save an archive of the current page:

javascript:void(window.open('https://web.archive.org/save/'+location.href));