The internet has numerous uses. The way we can benefit from the web depends on the purpose we are using it for; countless websites exist for entertainment, education, health, and every possible thinkable subject.

Most of us have certain pages bookmarked which we visit regularly to know what their new content is. We are referring to non-email and non-social-networking websites i.e. websites which are either informational or entertaining. Occasionally it happens that the webpage we are viewing is down for one reason or the other, and that prevents us from viewing the hosted content. This can cause great problems for some people. For instance a person who is done writing a website review and just needs to confirm the site’s motto tries to access the site only to find that it cannot be accessed; he/she cannot carry on his/her task unless the website comes back up.

One solution to this problem which we are all familiar with is to keep refreshing the page until we get a positive reaction and the site loads up. There are also various browser extensions available which facilitate timely page refreshing. While the “Refreshing” approach is workable, it can take up an enormous amount of time since one does not how long the site will take to be accessible again.

If you are Firefox user, you can walk around the ‘page refreshing’ solution and benefit from a great add-on titled Gcache Plus.

Gcache is a free Firefox add-on that lets Firefox users view the most recent Google cache of the webpage currently being viewed. When you have the add-on installed and enabled, and want to view the current URL in Google’s cache, simply press the following keyboard key combination: Ctrl+Alt+Shift+G.

Alternatively you can click on Gcache’s icon the bottom right of the browser:

A Gcache button can also be added in the toolbars area to add a button on top:

Instantly the Google cache will appear. Google may however ask you to enter some text in order to confirm that the cache viewing request was manually generated, not automatically. With the following example, you can see Gcache Plus in action.

Here is how the top of the add-on’s page on Mozilla’s looks like:

Now here is the region after using one of the methods described above to view the Google cache of the page:

Here is what the message on top (in gray) states: “This is Google’s cache of https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13694. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on 2 Dec 2009 10:33:24 GMT. The current page could have changed in the meantime.”

In this way we can view a webpage’s most recent Google cache image.

This add-on can prove to be a lifesaver in certain situations and no Firefox user should exclude it from their list of installed add-ons.