a firefox extension for checking link rot
I'm sick of clicking links and hitting 404 pages, home page redirects or sites that just don't exist anymore. Link rot sucks, and i want a way to know if a link is broken before I click it. This extension counts the number of links present on a webpage and checks each link to see if it returns an HTML status code error. If it does, it counts it as a broken link and displays it as broken.
Link rot will become more and more pervasive as time goes on. Pew Research says that 38% of webpages available in 2013 are no longer accesible in 2024. That sucks!
- Download folder
- Load the Extension: Go to about:debugging in Firefox, click "This Firefox" or "This Nightly", then "Load Temporary Add-on", and select the manifest.json file from the extensions directory.
- To detect broken links, click the extension on the toolbar.
This has some rough edges and a couple issues I'm working through:
- Extremely slow on sites with more than a few hundred links
- Doesn't persist list of broken links when popup is closed and reopened
- Ugly UI is ugly
- Doesn't run automatically
- Need to figure out CORS... i'm a system engineer, not a web developer, so this is a new concept to me
Microsoft redirects all their links... go figure. Will have to figure out how to detect that while still detecting homepage redirects for missing pages.
All these links are actually broken...home page redirect or 404 page. Working as expected.
- When a site is broken, add toggle to report the status code instead of just "broken"
- Better UI and accessibility features
- Upload to firefox extensions store
- Automatically run on page load instead of manually initiating the scan
- Highlighting broken links on the webpage
- Some kind of link rot reporting mechanism/database
- Automatically fetch archive.org versions and substitute broken links