There are many parts of the world where cellular and Wi-Fi speeds are still too slow for basic bandwidth intensive tasks like watching video. While Google has efforts such as Project Loon, they have also created physical locations in the Philippines that have cached YouTube videos for faster viewing.
HTTPS has become the rule, rather than the exception to the rule, in recent years. And in an effort to usher in the encrypted and more-secure communication protocol, Google announced last month that it would begin prioritizing HTTPS sites over HTTP sites when indexing the web. Unsurprisingly, Google is also slowly-but-surely making sure all of its own web properties use HTTPS over standard HTTP. Google’s cached pages available on the search site are now part of the club…
As reported by users on Twitter, Google has updated its cached link toolbar with new ways to view website snapshots. Cached webpages can now be viewed in their full glory with all styling intact, in a text-only version that strips all styling, or viewed by their source, meaning you can view the code behind the cached webpage.
Here’s what visiting the text-only cached version of Google.com looks like:
The company every so often will take a snapshot of a website and save it to its cache, so the page can still be viewable in the event that the website its hosted on becomes inaccessible. You can access the cached version of a webpage, like the one above, by searching for it on Google, clicking on the green down arrow directly to the right of a result URL, and clicking “Cached.” Click here to see the cached page for Google.com.
In the latest builds of Google’s Canary release channel of Chrome, there’s an interesting new feature popping up: the ability to press a single button to load a saved copy of a webpage you’ve previously visited. The feature surfaced less than a week after Google silently launched 64-bit versions of the Canary and Dev channels for Mac OS X.
This handy new feature can come in handy if you just need to quickly view a webpage and you’re finding yourself without a connection. But of course, you’ll only be able to view cached versions of webpages that are actually cached—you’ll need to have visited the page at some point prior. To try out the feature, you’ll need the Canary build of Chrome which can be downloaded here.
