Category: Firefox

I have mixed feelings about the new Google Browser Sync. The premise is keeping all your Firefox settings synchronized across every computer you use, including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords. This is good in theory. I know there are plenty of times when I find something on one computer and then have to remember which computer in order to find the resource again. My concern comes from the implementation. In order to keep passwords, bookmarks and everything else in sync, the information is uploaded and stored on a Google server using the same Google account used for GMail, Google Talk and all the various other Google applications. Storing passwords and browser history on Google’s servers might be completely innocuous – a convenient repository of information. On the other hand all that information is definitively identifying in detail about where you go and what you do online. Google explicitly says in the terms of use, “Google may access, preserve, and disclose information regarding your use of the services if required to do so by law or under other conditions set forth in the Google Privacy Policy.” This gets scary if you ever end up getting divorced and your future-ex subpoenas your Internet history as some sort of proving ground for a relationship turned sour, or more importantly if the government decides they want to investigate a large block of Google users for patterns of behavior.
Keeping things in perspective, Google lets you choose what is or isn’t synchronized using advanced configuration. Google offers encryption for all this data, but fails in letting us know whether they hold a master key to decrypt it on their end. From my view, I’m inclined to use something like this to store my tab groupings to easily open them on any computer, bookmarks for the convenience of accessing them, encrypt both, and pass on trusting Google to store passwords, history, and cookies on their server. Bottom line, if you opt to use Google Browser Sync, I recommend caution. [Firefox for Windows and Mac $0.00]

RSS is the information delivery tool keeping me on top of all the information I read daily. Without it, I’d be lost. While Firefox handles RSS auto-discovery, letting me know I can subscribe to something, with relative ease, it doesn’t elegantly add feeds to my RSS reader of choice (currently FeedDemon). Feed Your Reader steps in and elegantly adds one-click subscription functionality to Firefox, eliminating the messy copy-and-paste steps required to get from Web page to RSS reader. If you need to stay on top of information for your job, hobby or just want to keep abreast of the latest news, Feed Your Reader makes subscribing painless.

With one million and one ways to get weather information from the Internet to your computer, it’s hard to decide which method is the best. Forecast Fox is a Firefox extension designed to integrate weather delivery into Firefox so the details are always a glance away. Weather data is powered by AccuWeather.com, which includes radar images and severe weather warnings. Weather data is good both for U.S. cities and international listings, providing more information than many other free tools. Customizable forecast ranges, toolbar position and depth of tooltip data are fully customizable. A profile system stores data about more than one city, making Forecast Fox convenient for business travelers or people who simply need to know the weather situation on vacation.

Ever had an experience where you were looking at a Web page, the browser crashes and all 20 pages you had open are suddenly gone? I hate it when that happens. SessionSaver prevents lost windows and information by saving all open Firefox windows, tabs, typed text and everything when the browser closes. Reopen Firefox and you pick up exactly where you left off. Manage multiple sessions to save groups of open tabs. TextSaver feature keeps track of text typed in Web pages. RemoteSync feature synchronizes your browser sessions between multiple computers. Keep in mind this is a potential security risk if you use a public computer, because other people could also open your sessions, but for personal use SessionSaver might be the single best reason to dump IE and switch to Firefox.

If you’re used to the window closing behavior in IE, where clicking the Red X in the corner closes the current browser window, getting used to closing tabs might be tricky. One way to make closing your tabs easier is to add a close button to each of the tabs using Tab X. This Firefox extension puts an X in the right corner of each tab, making it simple to clear out tabs when you no longer need them. You can still close the current tab using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+W, but you get the added advantage of closing a tab out of sequence with the click of your mouse.