Monday, November 21, 2011

Save Files From Browser’s Cache In Firefox

We know how internet browsers cache information from the internet to improve and speed up our browsing experience. The browser cache temporarily stores images, audio, video, text, JavaScript and various other parts of the webpage. This helps loading the page faster on revisit. Sometimes, it can be beneficial to have a look at this cache for some interesting stuff.

The cache stores many such content types as well that cannot otherwise be easily grabbed from the browser itself. For example, streaming videos are stored in the browser’s cache once they’ve completed loading; internet radio broadcasts would sit in the cache for a while. This means that if you scan the cache keenly enough, you are likely to find a lot more than you had intended.

CacheViewer is a Firefox add-on that allows a user to scan and save anything from the browser’s cache.

This add-on basically provides a GUI for Firefox’s ‘about:cache’ interface, albeit with nice improvements. CacheViewer not only lets you search for anything within the cache, you can also sort files based on their size and type. This comes in really handy as the cache generally contains an enormous number of useless files that take a lot of time going through manually. Once you have located your desired file(s), right click and select ‘Save As’ to move the file to a more convenient location on the hard drive.
CacheViewer was tested on Firefox 3.6.12 on Windows 7, 32-bit edition.


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