Synchronised browsing
THE FIREFOX WEB BROWSER is one of the great success stories of the Open Source software sector. From nowhere a few years ago it’s managed to scoop up a decent proportion of the Internet browser market. With the new version – Firefox 3 – having had 8m downloads on its day of release the program’s future appears rosy.
One of the reasons for the continued success of Firefox has been its ability to use add-ons with the browser. An add-on is a small program that adds a little functionality to the browser, such as changing the look of certain pages or reopening a page you’d just closed without having to dig through the history or even stopping the browser from recording the sites you’d visited. Almost anything that you could want from the browser can be added via this system.
To me, the most useful one of all is a small add-on called Foxmarks (www.foxmarks.com). What it does is back up the bookmarks on your browser to a central server. I use many computers – one at home, one for the office – and every now and then I have a review machine for a couple of weeks. The first thing I do is install Foxmarks, and it pulls down my bookmarks from the system and within minutes my browser on the new machine looks just like the one on my main computer. That means all the sites I visit regularly are right at my fingertips, no matter what machine I’m using.
Google used to provide something similar through Google Browser Sync, but that service has been discontinued. In my view Foxmarks, while not doing everything Google Browser Sync did, provides a better service. It stays out of your way and gets on with the job it promises to do. The even better news is that a version of Foxmarks for Internet Explorer is in the works, so those people who refuse to abandon the dark side and move to Firefox will soon have the same service at their fingertips. And best of all… it’s free.
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