Not sure where it would be best to discuss this, but you will not normally have developers reading posts in this forum.Probably better to try looking at this listing:

• http://www.mozilla.org/about/forums/#general-development
  at least someone ton one of those fora will probably point you in the right direction

You could file a bug requesting such a feature, but it would be much better to try to get someone interested in doing the work or agreeing it is worthwhile first.

It also occurs tome that what you may be more interested in is merely the History and not necessarily the cache, because presumably it is sufficient to have the link retained rather than the content itself. do you normally even try to search the cache rather then the History?

The History itself now by default goes back a long way, and only starts to restrict things if bookmarks are too extensive. (Not too sure at the moment where the links are but I recall changes in the algorithms maybe a year or too ago).

Another point is that short of copying your places.sqlite file there is no way of backing up history, there are no automated backups. (I know I accidentally cleared History recently, from the wrong profile, and had not backed it up for a long time)

Thanks John, for the answer and for using the word fora  :)

Ah, so you've revealed a fallacy in my underlying knowledge: the cache doesn't store the history, thus I could delete the cache and not lose any of the history. More reading required for me, but looks as if my request probably won't now be required.

Cheers!

Dez

Hi Dez,
A bit more info.

The History is in places.sqlite and the user interface is part of the Library/bookmarks manager Ctrl + Shift + H

Please do not comment in bugs, but this one may include some interesting background reading Bug 425219 - Places' history expiration algorithm seems overly complicated

Cheers John

P.S.
There are software extensions for cache viewing but you can get a lot of information by using about:cache key it into the location bar.

MY FireFox (21) does not cache any *.htm or *.html files, so most of the text (including numbers, in most cases) are also not available in local cache. When clicking on the "History" link, the page will often not be loaded with the same text and numbers as were there at the time the page was actually viewed. In this sense, I would GREATLY prefer a "History" that IS able to retrieves its pages from cache ... make it into an "Archive".

Is there a way to get FF to save the htm in cache? That would be MUCH more useful to ME, and would be much smaller files, than most of the graphics.

You did switch to File > [X] Work Offline mode?

You also need to make sure not to clear the cache and in case of a secure (https) connection, you need to keep those as well.

If you want to keep copies of a web page for later then best is to either save a screenshot of the full page (extensions can do this or the "screenshot --fullpage" command in the Web Developer Toolbar) or print the page to a PDF file.