I just discovered a Firefox plugin that promises to be fantastic. I’ve not tried it for enough time to say that it really rocks as it seems, but I’ve never been disappointed by google stuff. Google Browser Sync is able to synchronize your browser bookmarks, cookies, passwords, etc. between multiple browsers. It’s much useful if you use different computers at office and at home.
Yes, you can keep in synch your security information… if you trust google. By the way you can choose to only keep bookmarks, that I think it is the most needed feature.

Since now I used Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer, and it works very well. A nice thing about it is that you can access your bookmarks also from a website; so that if you go in an internet point you still can browse your bookmarks without any plugin or firefox too.

What Google Browser Sync is missing:

1. As far as I know it doesn’t have a website for accessing this information online without firefox.
2. Social bookmarking, in the del.icio.us way also has to come.
3. It does not synchronizes plugins. I cannot wonder why: it should not be much different than syncing other stuff, and it can be useful too.
4. Knowing your passwords virtually lets google able to provide a universal single sign-on mechanism for the web. It won’t be bad, and it could worth the pain to share (some) passwords with google. I trust them enough to keep all my emails on gmail, so won’t be much different to store also passwords on it. A universal single sign-on would be great for the web.

Other Google plugins for Firefox can be download from here. I recommend you also Google Notebook and the toolbar. They work perfectly with Firefox 2.0

Are you tired to install applications that weaken stability of your OS? Or you just want to bring in a USB Pen Drive all your desktop applications to run them at work, at home and everywhere? The solution for both problems is “portable apps”.
A “portable app” is an application that does not need to be installed, and it’s just able to run from any folder and any media; for example a Pen Drive or Memory Cards. This makes the application less intrusive/dangerous for the host Operating System and, virtually, you could leave your laptop at home and bring a PenDrive in your pocket with all the necessary software, documents, and data everywhere. I found a couple of sites that distribute some portable version of most successful free software.

PortableApps.com distributes some modified version of Firefox, ThunderBird, SunBird, AbiWord, OpenOffice, etc. Notice that on my laptop the portable OpenOffice supplied didn’t work.

WinPenPack.com collects some portable applications and makes use of a launcher called X-Launcher that can run almost any application modifying environment settings to make the application portable. Think it as a sandbox or a runtime environment. So, WinPenPack makes available a huge collection of applications for any need. On WinPenPack there are packaged downloads of 256Mb or 512Mb, that fills in appropriate sized pen drives; but the nice thing is that you can choice to make your own a selection of portable software to best fit your needs, with WinPenPack Personal. There’s also a nice launcher called “WinPenPack Launcher” that can run from the traybar and it’s a sort of start menu for portable apps.

There are also some concerns: using portable apps “everywhere” brings the problem of security. You could run your apps in an Internet Cafe or other untrusted environments and contract some virus. It would be nice to use a “read-only” partition that hosts portable applications and a separate writeable partition hosting saved data with no executables. Tweaking a little with X-Launcher should do the work, and, also there are some security applications that can handle separate partitions (also encrypted) to avoid the problem. And, of course, there are some portable antivirus.

Actually I am using eclipse help server to do that (Preferences->Help->Help Server): Eclipse (3.2M4) uses an internal web server to read from a zip file and serve its content: I fixed the port (that by default is get randomly), so, after I started eclipse and pressed CTRL+F1, the help server is available and accessible thru firefox using an url like this: http://127.0.0.1:6789/help/nftopic/jar:file:/usr/lib/j2sdk1.4-sun/doc.zip!/docs/api/index.html. This is just a workaround that prevents you to unpack a >30MB zip file to read its content. You see that in the URL the file path is an absolute path, so you can access any zip file content in the filesystem without unpacking it.

But… I think that this should be a feature of (an intelligent) web browser. Web browsers are not only useful for online content today ;-)

For more discussion in this topic, see also: Starting Eclipse Help Server w/o launching Eclipse

With Firefox 1.5 there’s a new selector that makes it possible to define in userContent.css web site specific style. So you can add some style definition that will be applied for specific sites. The syntax is the following:

@-moz-document url-prefix(http://www.mysite.com/)
{
   /* define here specific css for http://www.mysite.com/ */

   /* example:
   div.rightbox {
      display: none !important;
   }
   */
}

I think that this is a cool feature. For example, I use Adblock plugin to remove ads from my favourite web sites. Combining new css feature in userContent.css with Adblock plugin, it’s possible to filter any ad from your favourite web sites, despite they use images, flash, javascripts or simple html:

Before and After the cure: at left, in internet explorer with all ads (in red circles); at right, the same site in Firefox using custom CSS and Adblock

about:
about:config
about:plugins
about:buildconfig
about:cache
about:cache?device=disk
about:cache?device=memory
about:credits
about:license
about:mozilla

About plugin: Mr Tech’s About:About plugin

Crystal Icons are licensed under LGPL license. Sometime ago I asked the author to understand how this license applies to icons, and I got in response “you can use it freely in non commercial (free/opensource) products; if you want to use them in a commercial product you have to buy them”. For anyone looking for good icons for an opensource product, Crystal set is a 1st class look and feel.

To do that, you have to create a file called proxy.pac in your filesystem, like this one:

 1function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
 2{
 3    if ( dnsDomainIs(host, "localhost") ||
 4         isPlainHostName(host) ||
 5         isInNet(host, "127.0.0.1", "255.255.255.255") )
 6        return "DIRECT";
 7
 8    if (isInNet(myIpAddress(), "192.168.0.0", "255.255.0.0"))  // HOME
 9        return "DIRECT";
10
11    if (isInNet(myIpAddress(), "10.1.0.0", "255.255.0.0"))  // CLIENT 1
12        return "PROXY web-proxy:8080";
13}

This means: when I connect to localhost or to 127.0.0.1 the browser will not have to use any proxy, going DIRECT.
When myIp is in 192.168.*.* don’t use any proxy (as I am @ home). When my ip is 10.1.*.* use “web-proxy:8080″, and so on…
The 255.255.0.0 is the net mask. 255 means perfect match, 0 means ‘anything’ matches (like “*” wildcard).

Once you created this file you go on “Firefox->Connection Settings->Automatic Proxy Configuration URL” and set the path of the proxy.pac file as in this sample: file:///C:/Windows/proxy.pac
Notice that (for mozilla) you have 3 slash.
Using IE, you set it on connection settings as this file://C:\Windows\proxy.pac.
For Opera you set automatic proxy configuration with something like file://C:/Windows/proxy.pac

Then and for the next, when browsing the javascript will be executed and the correct proxy will be automatically selected.

Many apps also get internet settings by IE, so this works well for many apps (MSN messenger, for example). Some others don’t (i.e. gaim, eclipse…). So you still have to do something manually.
Warning: Google Web Accelerator, overwrites proxy settings in IE,using its own proxy.pac file. I won’t use it until they fix this.

There are several tools like NetSwitcher that handle this issue, but they can’t handle any rebellious apps (like gaim and eclipse…).