Whoa! Brave browser can now show you web pages that no longer exist

When browsing the web, it can be frustrating to encounter a 404 error. You know the page isn’t there, but you don’t always know why. Has it been removed on purpose, by accident, or was it never there in the first place?

Well, Brave -- the browser from Brendan Eich, a former CEO of Mozilla -- is about to make 404 frustration a thing of the past, by giving you the chance to view the actual web page after it’s been removed.

No, it’s not witchcraft, although it might sound like it. What the browser has actually done is incorporate the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine’s lookup process. So now when the browser encounters a 404 error, it will let you click a button to show the archived page from that site.

It’s not only looking for 404 errors either. 408, 410, 451, 500, 502, 503, 504, 509, 520, 521, 523, 524, 525, and 526 errors are also covered.

The Wayback Machine has archived more than 900 billion URLs, and more than 400 billion web pages over the past 23 years. It adds many hundred million more archived URLs each day, so there's a very good chance it will be able to show you the page you're looking for.

Download Brave to try out the feature now. Here's a good first page to try it on.