There are many different scenarios behind broken links, dead websites or 404 errors. For one, the server could in fact be down or overloaded. Especially popular sites like Facebook or Twitter are often slow and timed out when hit by the masses. The same is true for pages that receive a short-lived hype via Digg, Del.icio.us and the like.

On the other hand it may be an issue on your side. Just think of a bumpy ISP or a bad wireless connection. In any case, it’s annoying when you cannot access a website, and constantly hitting the reload button doesn’t make it any better.
Here are three Firefox addons to ease your mind.

I’ve previously written about how you can save and monitor bandwidth when using Firefox. In that post, I wrote about a few settings that you can alter and a few extensions that you can install for optimising bandwidth usage. Now, I’d like to introduce a relatively unknown Firefox extension called Better Cache to all of you.

For those of you who don’t know, the cache is a place on your hard disk where Firefox stores the websites you’ve visited temporarily. Firefox caches visited sites so that when you access them the next time after you’ve closed them, it need not download the page again. This saves you potential bandwidth. But the downside is that the cached version will not display the recent changes to the site (meaning you need to refresh the page).