Brave Browser partners with Wayback Machine to fight 404 errors
Nothing is ever truly gone on the internet.
Brave's new update gives you a notification to search the Wayback Machine when you encounter a 404 page, like this one on Amazon.
Getting a 404 "page not found" error message is one of the most frustrating experiences of browsing the internet. You find a site through search or a link on a website and when you get there it's gone. In a new update, the Brave Browser has teamed up with the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to help make such an annoyance a thing of the past.
The update to the desktop version of Brave can take you to an archived version of the page with just a click by putting a drop-down notification asking if you'd like to "check for saved version" of the page you're visiting.
Browser extensions that offer similar functionality exist for Safari, Chrome and Firefox but Brave's integration is into the browser itself without needing to add an extra step.
The Internet Archive doesn't have every webpage from every moment, but in its release touting the partnership the group says it has been in business for 23 years and has "archived more than 900 billion URLs, and more than 400 billion Web pages, and adds many hundred million more archived URLs each day."
In addition to the 404 error, the system will also work for a host of other error codes such as 408, 410, 451, 500, 502, 503, 504, 509, 520, 521, 523, 524, 525 and 526.
In a poke at the Trump White House, the Internet Archive recommends heading to its climate change page as a way to test if the system works.
A rival to Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari, Brave is a privacy-focused browser that came out of beta late last year. In her review, CNET's Rae Hodge praised the browser as being "hands-down the fastest browser I've used this year on any operating system."
