How to browse old versions of websites

The Wayback Machine is an online service that frequently crawls websites, taking snapshots of sites at a particular point in time. Using the Wayback Machine, you can see what almost any site looked like throughout its lifespan.

Websites change frequently, and so do laws governing these websites. Whether due to data loss, new censorships on content, or even just out of curiosity, the Wayback Machine allows you to see content that no longer exists on the web. The Wayback Machine can also be used for troubleshooting.

Note: Certain sites may not appear due to that site being password protected, blocked by robots.txt, or was inaccessible for some other reason.

Head over to the Internet Archive’s official website and enter the URL of the site you’d like to look back on in the Wayback Machine’s address bar. Once entered, click “Browse History.”

On the next page, you’ll see a timeline with all the years that contains a snapshot of the entered website. There’s also a note about how many snapshots of the website there are between two dates.

Select the year you’d like to view.

Now you’ll see a calendar view of the selected year. On certain dates throughout the year, you’ll notice that it’s highlighted with a specific color. Here’s what they mean:

• No color: The website was not saved on this date.
• Blue: The website was successfully saved on this date.
• Green: This indicates a (3xx) redirect.

You’ll also notice that some circles are larger than others. This means that the website has multiple snapshots for that particular date. Note that this does not represent the number of times the site was updated.

Select the date/time you’d like to view by hovering your cursor over the date and selecting the snapshot from the pop-up menu.

You can now browse the archived version of the website.

How-To Geek – Nov. 27, 2010

Want to view old web pages or a site that’s currently offline? Here’s how to find and access cached web pages using Google, the Wayback Machine, and other tools.

It’s easy to forget the impermanence of the internet. Pages are edited without warning and websites can disappear overnight.

There are plenty of ways to lose access to a site or web page. Maybe the servers are down, or perhaps the site owner has altered or removed the content you’re trying to find. In these cases, one option is to view the cached version.

Google regularly crawls the web searching for new pages to index, while also saving backup copies of the pages it scans. Web browsers do the same in order to load pages faster. These snapshots are preserved in the cache—an area of your local hard drive that is temporarily accessible if a site goes down or certain content is removed. Not all websites are indexed by Google or saved in a cache, but for those that are, here’s how to access them.

Google Search

Viewing a cached Google page starts the same as any other search. Once you’ve entered your query and found a search result, click the arrow next to the URL and choose the Cached option to view Google’s most recent saved version of the page.

When the site loads, Google will notify you it is an older version and list when the snapshot was taken. You’ll also have the option to view a text-only version of the page, as well as its source code. However, be aware that you won’t be able to navigate to any other pages and remain in the cached version; you’ll be taken to the live site if you try.

Chrome Address Bar

If you’re using the Chrome web browser, type cache: in the address bar and add the URL without leaving a space. The browser will pull up the cached version of the website in question, just as if you had gone through Google.

Wayback Machine

Viewing cached versions of websites only goes so far. A number of entities are devoted to preserving internet history; most prominent is the nonprofit Internet Archive, which hosts websites, texts, video, audio, software, and images that can be hard to find anywhere else. You can view even older versions of a website with the Wayback Machine, which works for live and offline websites.

Enter the URL you want to explore, and the archival search engine will show a calendar that indicates when the Wayback Machine crawled that page. Click a date on the calendar to see what the site looked like on that day. The Wayback Machine is a great way to view the history of the internet; archived versions of PCMag.com date back to Dec. 19, 1996.

Archive.Today

The archiving website Archive.Today allows users to save current web pages and also search for existing entries that have previously been saved. Entering a URL for saving allows you to view a web page as it currently exists, save it to the site, and download the page to your computer.

If you want to view archived versions of a website, enter the URL in the appropriate search bar and Archive.Today will populate results for the homepage and associated individual pages. If there are multiple versions of the same page, they will be stacked together for easy viewing.

PCMag’s website, for instance, is archived as far back as 2012 and currently has four different versions of the homepage saved on the service.

Browser Extensions

Browser extensions can also access cached sites. Add Web Cache Viewer to Chrome and right-click on any page to view the Google or Wayback Machine version of the webpage. The View Page Archive & Cache extension for Chrome and Firefox goes even further, letting you view cached webpage versions from more than a dozen search engines, including Bing, Baidu, and Yandex.

Web Tools

Other online tools include Cached Page, which searches a given URL across the Google web cache, Internet Archive, and archiving service WebCite. Google Cache Checker also checks whether a site is indexed by Google and pulls up any cached webpages it finds.

The Wayback Machine is an online service that frequently crawls websites and takes snapshots of websites at a point in time. The Wayback machine lets you see what almost every site looked like for its entire life.

Websites change frequently, as do the laws that govern those websites. Whether due to data loss, new content censorship, or just out of curiosity, the Wayback machine allows you to view content that no longer exists on the web. The wayback machine can also be used for troubleshooting.

CONNECTED: Bots and volunteers replaced 9 million broken Wikipedia references with wayback machine links

Note: Certain websites may not be displayed because that website was password protected, blocked by robots.txt, or inaccessible for some other reason.

Visit the official website of the Internet Archive and type the URL of the website you want to look back on into the address bar of the Wayback computer. After entering it, click “Search History&#8221

On the next page you will see a timeline with all the years containing a snapshot of the entered website. There is also an indication of how many snapshots of the website there are between two dates.

Select the year you want to view.

You will now see a calendar view of the selected year. On certain dates throughout the year, you will notice that it is highlighted with a certain color. This is what they mean:

• No colour: The website was not saved on this date.
• Blue: The website was successfully saved on this date.
• Green: This indicates a (3xx) redirect.

You will also find that some circles are larger than others. This means that the website has multiple snapshots for that particular date. Note that this is the case Not Include how often the website was updated.

Choose the date / time you want to view by hovering over the date and choosing the snapshot from the pop-up menu.

You can now search the archived version of the website.

How-To Geek – November 27, 2010

Last updated Dec. 29, 2020.

The Web changes constantly, and sometimes that page that had just the information you needed yesterday (or last month or two years ago) is not available today. At other times you may want to see how a page’s content or design has changed. There are several sources for finding Web pages as they used to exist.

While Google’s cache is probably the best known, the others are important alternatives that may have pages not available at Google or the Wayback Machine plus they may have an archived page from a different date. The table below notes the name of the service, the way to find the archived page, and some notes that should give some idea as to how old a page the archive may contain.

Note that none of these include all Web pages. A robots.txt file or a in the header of a file can prohibit the crawling of the page. Google and other should look for a in the header and not cache such pages. But the exclusions do not always work. Other possible ways to resurrect a dead link include checking in your local browser’s cache if you visited the page recently or hope that someone else copied and posted the file on the Web.

For more details on searching the Wayback Machine, see my article “The Wayback Machine: The Web’s Archive.” ONLINE 26(2): 59-61, Mar.-Apr. 2002.

It’s 2019, but some businesses and government agencies still have old websites that don’t function correctly in new web browsers. Windows 10 still includes Internet Explorer 11 and Microsoft has committed to supporting it with security updates.

We recommend avoiding Internet Explorer when possible. It’s old and outdated. It doesn’t include modern web features and is likely easier to attack than modern web browsers. Only use it when necessary—which, for most people, shouldn’t be much.

Even Microsoft recommends avoiding IE and encourages you to use Microsoft Edge instead. Microsoft’s Chris Jackson has called Internet Explorer a “compatibility solution“—not a modern web browser you should use.

How to Open a Web Page in IE From Edge

If you use Microsoft Edge, you can quickly open web pages in Internet Explorer when necessary.

To do so, click menu > More Tools > Open with Internet Explorer. Edge will launch IE and open the current web page.

How to Launch Internet Explorer on Windows 10

You don’t have to use Edge to launch IE. You can launch Internet Explorer and use it normally. You’ll find Internet Explorer in your Start menu.

To launch Internet Explorer on Windows 10, click the Start button, search for “Internet Explorer,” and press Enter or click the “Internet Explorer” shortcut.

If you use IE a lot, you can pin it to your taskbar, turn it into a tile on your Start menu, or create a desktop shortcut to it.

Don’t see Internet Explorer in your Start menu? The IE feature may be removed—it’s installed by default, but you’re free to remove it.

Head to Control Panel > Programs > Turn Windows features on or off. (You can launch the Control Panel by searching for it in the Start menu, too.) Ensure “Internet Explorer 11” is checked in the list of features here and click “OK.”

How to Automatically Open Specific Websites in IE

For system administrators, Windows 10 offers an “Enterprise Mode” feature. Administrators can add a list of websites to the Enterprise Mode list. When a user visits a site on the list in Microsoft Edge, Edge will automatically open that web page in Internet Explorer 11.

This lets users use the Microsoft Edge browser normally. Rather than manually launching IE, Edge will automatically launch IE when they navigate to a website that requires Internet Explorer.

This option is part of Windows Group Policy. You’ll find the “Configure the Enterprise Mode Site List” option at Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Microsoft Edge\.

This will all likely change a bit with the launch of the new Microsoft Edge. It’ll be based on Chromium, the open-source project that forms the basis of the Google Chrome web browser. But Internet Explorer, in some form, is set to be part of Windows 10 for the foreseeable future. It’s still necessary for websites that require ActiveX and browser helper objects.

IE may soon be the best way to use old websites that require Adobe Flash on Windows soon, too.

Q. Sometimes I’ll go to an old website and find it’s been replaced with a page of advertising. Where do all the original sites go?

A. Many live websites have gone dark over the years as their owners have unplugged the servers that hosted the pages for public viewing and given up the registered domain names that once guided visitors to the site. Other entrepreneurs have been known to snap up expired domain names to use for other purposes, like posting pages of advertising links (or other content) to greet people looking for the original website.

If you are feeling nostalgic for the way some old sites used to look, you might be able to see copies of the pages the way they once appeared by visiting the Wayback Machine, an expanding collection of 455 billion web pages — and growing. (And yes, the site was named after the time machine used by the Mr. Peabody character from the television cartoon series that first aired in the late 1950s.)

Although the Wayback Machine’s holdings date back to the mid-1990s, not every website is included in the collection. But you can probably find samples of most commercial sites from the past 15 years or so. Just type in the address of the site you are looking for to see what may have been saved.

The Wayback Machine is part of the Internet Archive, a free online library of digital media and electronic artifacts. In addition to the collection of web pages, the Internet Archive also hosts a research library of television news programs, live music recordings and other audio and text files and e-books, movies, and thousands of old computer programs — including video games for arcades, computers and consoles.

Finding the Right Broadband Speed

Q. My current broadband service is slow and it takes forever to download a movie. I want to upgrade to a faster level, but it gets expensive. How much speed do I need to stream a Netflix movie without stalling, make a video call or download a digital rental in less time than it takes to watch it?

A. When calculating your speed needs, take into account all the online activities you wish to do (streaming, downloading, gaming, videoconferencing and so on) and check the minimum connection rates needed for each. You can usually find the recommendations listed on the websites of the companies and services you use. Video-related activities typically require more network speed and bandwidth than things like audio streaming or basic web browsing.

For example, Netflix recommends a connection of at least three megabits per second for streaming video in standard definition and a connection of five megabits per second for watching high-definition content without stuttering or buffering. (If you are shopping for a new broadband company based on your video-streaming needs, Netflix posts its own speed rankings of Internet service providers each month on its blog.) As with streaming, file download speeds can suffer from general Internet and server congestion, but a connection at 25 megabits per second can let you download a six-gigabyte movie file in less than 20 minutes.

Microsoft’s Skype video-calling service recommends a connection of 1.5 megabits per second for high-definition video calls, and a Google Hangouts support page suggests a connection speed of 2.6 megabits per second as the “ideal bandwidth for the best experience.” The support sites of most online video games should also list the minimum broadband connection speeds among the requirements for processor, memory and other hardware factors. If you plan to post photos or videos of your own online, a plan that offers decent data upload speeds will make you wait less for that as well.

Once you have gathered your findings on the connection speeds for your preferred online services, check the packages available from local ISPs offering cable, satellite, fiber optic or DSL broadband. For instance, if you primarily want smooth streams of high-definition movies from Netflix, get a service plan that offers at least the recommended five-megabits-per-second connection. The number of people using the broadband connection at one time should also be factored in, so you may want to get a faster plan if the household includes online gamers as well as movie buffs.

As Internet service providers have built up their broadband networks over the years, they have been able to increase their offerings to appeal to a wider range of customer needs and budgets, so you may see four or five service plans offered; maximum speeds for downloads and uploads should be listed for each tier of service. This past January, the Federal Communications Commission updated its 2010 benchmark for “broadband” from a download speed of four megabits per second to 25 megabits per second, so the labels and types of plans offered by the ISPs may shift again in the future.

The Wayback Machine is an online service that frequently crawls websites, taking snapshots of sites at a particular point in time. Using the Wayback Machine, you can see what almost any site looked like throughout its lifespan.

Websites change frequently, and so do laws governing these websites. Whether due to data loss, new censorships on content, or even just out of curiosity, the Wayback Machine allows you to see content that no longer exists on the web. The Wayback Machine can also be used for troubleshooting.

Note: Certain sites may not appear due to that site being password protected, blocked by robots.txt, or was inaccessible for some other reason.

Head over to the Internet Archive’s official website and enter the URL of the site you’d like to look back on in the Wayback Machine’s address bar. Once entered, click “Browse History.”

On the next page, you’ll see a timeline with all the years that contains a snapshot of the entered website. There’s also a note about how many snapshots of the website there are between two dates.

Select the year you’d like to view.

Now you’ll see a calendar view of the selected year. On certain dates throughout the year, you’ll notice that it’s highlighted with a specific color. Here’s what they mean:

• No color: The website was not saved on this date.
• Blue: The website was successfully saved on this date.
• Green: This indicates a (3xx) redirect.

You’ll also notice that some circles are larger than others. This means that the website has multiple snapshots for that particular date. Note that this does not represent the number of times the site was updated.

Select the date/time you’d like to view by hovering your cursor over the date and selecting the snapshot from the pop-up menu.

You can now browse the archived version of the website.

How-To Geek – Nov. 27, 2010

Q. Sometimes I’ll go to an old website and find it’s been replaced with a page of advertising. Where do all the original sites go?

A. Many live websites have gone dark over the years as their owners have unplugged the servers that hosted the pages for public viewing and given up the registered domain names that once guided visitors to the site. Other entrepreneurs have been known to snap up expired domain names to use for other purposes, like posting pages of advertising links (or other content) to greet people looking for the original website.

If you are feeling nostalgic for the way some old sites used to look, you might be able to see copies of the pages the way they once appeared by visiting the Wayback Machine, an expanding collection of 455 billion web pages — and growing. (And yes, the site was named after the time machine used by the Mr. Peabody character from the television cartoon series that first aired in the late 1950s.)

Although the Wayback Machine’s holdings date back to the mid-1990s, not every website is included in the collection. But you can probably find samples of most commercial sites from the past 15 years or so. Just type in the address of the site you are looking for to see what may have been saved.

The Wayback Machine is part of the Internet Archive, a free online library of digital media and electronic artifacts. In addition to the collection of web pages, the Internet Archive also hosts a research library of television news programs, live music recordings and other audio and text files and e-books, movies, and thousands of old computer programs — including video games for arcades, computers and consoles.

Finding the Right Broadband Speed

Q. My current broadband service is slow and it takes forever to download a movie. I want to upgrade to a faster level, but it gets expensive. How much speed do I need to stream a Netflix movie without stalling, make a video call or download a digital rental in less time than it takes to watch it?

A. When calculating your speed needs, take into account all the online activities you wish to do (streaming, downloading, gaming, videoconferencing and so on) and check the minimum connection rates needed for each. You can usually find the recommendations listed on the websites of the companies and services you use. Video-related activities typically require more network speed and bandwidth than things like audio streaming or basic web browsing.

For example, Netflix recommends a connection of at least three megabits per second for streaming video in standard definition and a connection of five megabits per second for watching high-definition content without stuttering or buffering. (If you are shopping for a new broadband company based on your video-streaming needs, Netflix posts its own speed rankings of Internet service providers each month on its blog.) As with streaming, file download speeds can suffer from general Internet and server congestion, but a connection at 25 megabits per second can let you download a six-gigabyte movie file in less than 20 minutes.

Microsoft’s Skype video-calling service recommends a connection of 1.5 megabits per second for high-definition video calls, and a Google Hangouts support page suggests a connection speed of 2.6 megabits per second as the “ideal bandwidth for the best experience.” The support sites of most online video games should also list the minimum broadband connection speeds among the requirements for processor, memory and other hardware factors. If you plan to post photos or videos of your own online, a plan that offers decent data upload speeds will make you wait less for that as well.

Once you have gathered your findings on the connection speeds for your preferred online services, check the packages available from local ISPs offering cable, satellite, fiber optic or DSL broadband. For instance, if you primarily want smooth streams of high-definition movies from Netflix, get a service plan that offers at least the recommended five-megabits-per-second connection. The number of people using the broadband connection at one time should also be factored in, so you may want to get a faster plan if the household includes online gamers as well as movie buffs.

As Internet service providers have built up their broadband networks over the years, they have been able to increase their offerings to appeal to a wider range of customer needs and budgets, so you may see four or five service plans offered; maximum speeds for downloads and uploads should be listed for each tier of service. This past January, the Federal Communications Commission updated its 2010 benchmark for “broadband” from a download speed of four megabits per second to 25 megabits per second, so the labels and types of plans offered by the ISPs may shift again in the future.

Editor for TechNet UK

By Martin Beeby, Microsoft Technical Evangelist, Microsoft UK

Twice this week I’ve been asked how you can test older versions of Internet Explorer. Once whilst delivering a guest lecture at Stafford University, and then just a few hours later via email. Here are my thoughts.

The first version of this article was written over four years ago, so as we approach the end of 2015 I thought it would be useful to revisit this topic.

1. Developer Tools

Firstly, IE8, IE9, IE10 and IE11 all have developer tools that you can access by pressing F12 whilst in Internet Explorer. These allow you to change your document and browser mode to go back to older rendering engines, which you can find on the emulation tab in the tools. If you are using Microsoft Edge, you will notice that it doesn’t have different browser modes that you can use, as this feature is only available in IE9, IE10 and IE11. It should be noted that these tools are not the same as the rendering engines used in the original browsers, so whilst they are useful if you are trying to reproduce a reported bug, they should not be used to confirm that your site is working correctly or looking pixel perfect in an older browser. To learn more about the developer tools, head over to MSDN.

2. Virtual Machines

For the most accurate results you will want to use Virtual Machines so that you can run the browsers in a real-world environment. This is by far and away the most popular way to do browser testing in my experience.

3. Hosted Virtual Machines

BrowserStack is a paid service that allows you to test IE6-11 and Edge (and every other major browser like Chrome, Opera, Safari, Firefox as well as iOS and Android emulators) inside your browser. There are also browser plugins available for Chrome and Firefox which make launching BrowserStack even easier.

With BrowserStack you can simply start up a new virtual machine in the cloud, running practically any OS, and then test your website in that environment.

4. Modern.ie Scanner

The Modern.ie scanner uses a node.js service (which is available on GitHub) to go fetch a website and interrogate it to locate common problems. It then provides a report which details what you may need to do to fix you website so that it works well in IE and also other standards-based browsers.

Further Reading

Edge is Microsoft’s new web browser, and the default browser in Windows 10. Since upgrades from Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 will be free for most, you can expect there has been a huge influx of Edge users. If you still need help, you can visit the community forum if you still need help using Internet Explorer.