I would love a way to skip the selection of a hyper-specific date and time. Most of the time I really do not care whether I'm looking at the page as it existed on March 18th 2006 at 9:13am, or April 21st 2006 at 7:44pm.
I just want "take me to 2006". One click. Where in 2006 doesn't matter, just do something for me, it's probably the right thing.
If I need to get into more detail, okay, THEN let me pull open a more specific capture picker.
Very much so. Usability is not great across archive.org (it has tons of gems, but they’re hard to find organically). My small recurring donation has the explicit goal of improving it, but it looks like that hasn’t happened yet.
The greatest Archive of the Internet (and perhaps humanity) deserves a better UI.
I use this extension (the Chrome one), and it's really nice in that if the page you navigate to returns a 404 and it still exists in the wayback machine, the 404 page is replaced with a big 'view this on archive.org' button.
As someone who is constantly digging deep in the indie-web of personal websites which 50% of the time have long since gone, it's really useful.
Most of the controls in Vandal are designed to allow quick navigation to specific snapshots. But I do see a use case for a feature like "jump to year" .
I understand. It sounds awful. The use-case here being the built-in browser requires host permissions to all url's for navigation purposes. Removing it causing access issues when navigating to a another page through a link within the webpage.
Wouldn't it be easier (if a little less slick-looking) to hang the date selection UI off an extension bar button rather than putting it into the actual web page? Then that permission could potentially be dropped.
Well you could support both or make a browser extension that simply redirects there on click.
Not sure what permissions are needed to get the current url from the plugin though.
But if it's really more about a good way to browse the way back machine I think a web-service/site would make more sense. Installing a browser extension is quite a hurdle for something you don't need that often.
Too bad bookmarklets are not really a thing anymore, that would work well.
It's ironic that all the addons that I use to increase my privacy require full access to read my web browsing data:
HTTPS Everywhere, uBlock Origin, Firefox Multi-Account Containers, etc.
Personally I'm afraid that as soon as the wayback machine becomes popular enough, calls for its censorship will start the surface, along with takedown requests for IP. Is there a solution to this other than obscurity?
I just want "take me to 2006". One click. Where in 2006 doesn't matter, just do something for me, it's probably the right thing.
If I need to get into more detail, okay, THEN let me pull open a more specific capture picker.