Tech Per

The Problem: Multiple Firefox Installations

If you don’t know Google Browser Sync Plugin, go give it a shot. You have to accept the fact, that google owns you already, so you might as well sync all your browser config and data to them anyway. When you have swallowed that pill, things will get easy.

My situation is, that I use a laptop at home and sometimes also at work, but I also use a stationary computer, installed at the place where I currently do my work. In addition to this, I frequently use a multiboot setup on the laptop, to both use windows and linux on the same computer. All of these different installations have firefox installed, as my favourite browser.

This leaves me with the problem of synchronizing browser settings and data like bookmarks, form data, passwords etc.

The Solution: Google Browser Sync Plugin

This is where the google browser sync plugin comes to rescue.  It synchronizes bookmarks, site history, form data, passwords, even cookies, to google under your google id, and automatically synchronizes changes out on the other firefox installations. So, when I login to some site X on my stationary computer at work, and get a “remember me” cookie set by X-site, this cookie gets synchronized to my laptop at home, when I start firefox there. When I take a peek in the visited sites history of firefox, I can see the sites visited on other computers. And so on. It can also sync open tabs, but I found the “at work tabs” to be quite different from my “at home tabs” so I turned that feature off.  You have the option of encrypting everything sent.

My Wish: A Google Mail Sync Plugin for Thunderbird

And here is my wish: A plugin like the browser sync one, but for the Thunderbird email program. It would be cool, to have stuff like address book, email-account setup, … sync’ed to the google account. Does anyone know if google has such a plugin or is planning to build one? Alternatively, if there are other good services like that for Thunderbird?